Let’s get the good stuff out of the way above the fold. Raspberry Pi 2 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Model B+), featuring:

A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance)

1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)

Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.

Raspberry Pi 2

BCM2836 and Raspberry Pi 2

Since we launched the original Raspberry Pi Model B, back in 2012, we’ve done an enormous amount of software work to get the best out of our Broadcom BCM2835 application processor and its 700MHz ARM11 CPU. We’ve spent a lot of money on optimising a wide variety of open-source libraries and applications, including WebKit, LibreOffice, Scratch, Pixman, XBMC/Kodi, libav and PyPy. At the same time, the Raspbian project, run by Peter Green and Mike Thompson, has provided us with an ARMv6-compatible rebuild of Debian with hardware floating point support, and Gordon, Dom and Jonathan have spent thousands of hours working on the firmware and board support to make Raspberry Pi the most stable single board computer in the world. It’s worth going back and trying out an old SD card image from 2012 to get an idea of how far we’ve come.

Nonetheless, there comes a point when there’s no substitute for more memory and CPU performance. Our challenge was to figure out how to get this without throwing away our investment in the platform or spoiling all those projects and tutorials which rely on the precise details of the Raspberry Pi hardware. Fortunately for us, Broadcom were willing to step up with a new SoC, BCM2836. This retains all the features of BCM2835, but replaces the single 700MHz ARM11 with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 complex: everything else remains the same, so there is no painful transition or reduction in stability.

First silicon arrived last year, as we can see in this professionally shot video from bringup night:

Once we were confident that BCM2836 was performing as expected, James designed a series of prototypes, before we settled on the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that launches today. This has an identical form-factor to the existing Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+, but manages to pack in both the new BCM2836 and a full 1GB of SDRAM from our friends at Micron. All of the connectors are in the same place and have the same functionality, and the board can still be run from a 5V micro-USB power adapter.

Raspberry Pi 2 is available to buy today from our partners element14 and RS Components. Remember you’ll need an updated NOOBS or Raspbian image including an ARMv7 kernel and modules from our downloads page. At launch, we are using the same ARMv6 Raspbian userland on both Raspberry Pi 1 and 2; over the next few months we will investigate whether we can obtain higher performance from regular ARMv7 Debian, or whether we can selectively replace a small number of libraries to get the best of both worlds. Now that we’re using an ARMv7 core, we can also run Ubuntu: a Snappy Ubuntu Core image is available now and a package for NOOBS will be available in the next couple of weeks.

Windows 10

For the last six months we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2. Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months. The Raspberry Pi 2-compatible version of Windows 10 will be available free of charge to makers.

Visit WindowsOnDevices.com today to join the Windows Developer Program for IoT and receive updates as they become available.

FAQs

We’ll keep updating this list over the next couple of days, but here are a few to get you started.

Are you discontinuing the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and B+?

No. We have a lot of industrial customers who will want to stick with Raspberry Pi 1 for the time being. We’ll keep building Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model B+ as long as there’s demand for it. Both these boards will continue to sell for $35.

What about Model A+?
Model A+ continues to be the $20 entry-level Raspberry Pi for the time being. Although the new board is called Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, we have no plans to introduce a Raspberry Pi 2 Model A before the end of 2015.

What about the Compute Module?
We expect to introduce a BCM2836-based Compute Module in the medium term, but for now we’re focused on getting Raspberry Pi 2 Model B out of the door.

Are you still using VideoCore?
Yes. VideoCore IV 3d is the onlypublicly documented 3d graphics core for ARM-based SoCs, and we want to make Raspberry Pi more open over time, not less.

Where does the “6x performance” figure come from?
The speedup varies between applications. We’ve seen single-threaded CPU benchmarks that speed up by as little as 1.5x, while Sunspider is around 4x faster, and NEON-enabled multicore video codecs can be over 20x faster. 6x is a typical figure for a multi-threaded CPU benchmark like SysBench.

How Fantastic. The Raspberry Pi was brilliant already. Keeping it low cost at a minor inconvenience of speed was the right decision. But now we get the speed too – and for no extra cost. How fantastic is that.

Well I think that is a case of wait and see. I don’t know how open it will be with windows but I can’t see the foundation being held to ransom with them on board unless this is some scheme in patent trolling they are working up

Is the BCM2836 a custom chip or one based on an existing Broadcom SoC with certain bits fused off? If it’s custom, why not include all the USB ports and Ethernet Hub directly so you can ditch the SMSC Hub?

Thanks for the info! Had a look at the pricing on the Microchip website though and noticed a rather high price of around $5 for the chip(The foundation ought to have a very large discount though). Might be a future thing to reduce the costs of the Pi further :).

How would this make the new boards incompatible with the old ones if the connectors are all the same? Unless it’s about backwards compatibility for the future compute module or reusing the same motherboards?

Great work!
I’m about to buy my first Raspberry Pi and thinking of going for this one. Is there any reason for me, as a newbie in development of embedded systems, to NOT go for this one and take a look at the A and B instead?

Power consumptions lies between the old B, and the B+, but obviously depends on what you are doing, for example how many cores are actually active, how much you are over-clocking etc. But your old PSU from your B, or B+ will in most cases simply suffice.

Great news – well done to all!
I’ve ordered one already and looking forward to seeing how well it runs Ubuntu and other Linux software. With 1GB memory it’s now as much as the Lubuntu netbook I’m currently on and hopefully the new processor will make it responsive.
Very exciting times!

damn, was really hoping for gigabit ethernet and usb3 to be included:( You should try and get intel to licence you their gpu for the raspberry pi 3 as their drivers are open source, would be a way better gpu.

I feel like an idiot for ordering more B+ pi’s dang it. So you can thank me for this…everytime I order anything the next day they update it. And I thought they said they were sticking with this so as not to obsolete everybody’s investment. I guess not. However, not complaining, this is amazing work at an amazing price. And, personally, I could care less about windows but if it brings in more people then Raspberry Pi will flourish (even more) and that is great for everybody (other than maybe Dell, HP, Lenovo etc who will have to scramble to cut prices even if they are selling a “full” windows 10 on their machines).

They also have a strong developer story and are working hard to let those developers leverage their skillsets and the power of C# with the coolness of Raspberrypi. Plus they are opensourcing more and more of their code these days. They have become a player in a lot of different spaces and a responsible citizen of the community.

Unfortunately /. ran with the article from the register which went out early AND contained misinformation about the CPU core. So the first pagefull of comments are moaning about something that turned out to be misinformation.

It is exciting to see Windows 10 coming, but very very disappointing that we still don’t seem to have a working Android build. Why is it the closed source product is getting in first? Because the video drivers seem to be the choking point. Wonder if MS kicked in some sponsorship too?

No, we aren’t seeing sponsorship from MS. This is an open platform, so if MS wants to develop for it, they’re welcome to, and we’re pleased to see them making the effort – likewise, if Android devs want to develop for the platform we’re delighted to see them doing that. Our own engineering focus is on Raspbian.

“What about Model A+?
Model A+ continues to be the $20 entry-level Raspberry Pi for the time being. Although the new board is called Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, we have no plans to introduce a Raspberry Pi 2 Model A before the end of 2015.”

Maybe you should change this question/answer after the announcement today ;)

While I suspect that the RPF would like to bring out a Pi2A, I’d tend to bet that the production lines are going to be under serious strain getting enough Pi2Bs out to meet demand. It’s been mentioned that there are 100K of them at launch. Those will be gone very quickly, at a bet, and it will be a struggle to make and ship enough for at least 3 or 4 months.

There is likely to be a longer demand for the A+, anyway, as it can be used in applications that are more sensitive to keeping power requirements down than will be the case for most B/B+/Pi2B applications, so less need for a Pi2A.

800MHz in specs, but clocked with 900MHz by RPi2?
then the RPi2 is overclocked already by manufacturer!
i guess, then we can not expect as much overclock range possibility on RPi2 as on RPi in the past – if the RPi2 will be overclockable without losing warants :?

“We were being conservative on the frequency in case we encountered issues in production. In practice, we’ve found we’re fine at 900MHz, with significant overclocking headroom over that. ” — Eben Upton, CEO at Raspberry Pi

What’s the point of overclocking a device like this? My 3 year old dual core laptop is faster than that pi 2 can ever be. Overclocking for a device like raspberry pi doesn’t make sense at all unless for the sake of overclocking itself. In that case grab your LN2 bottle and get started.:)

I wonder the same. I have had a lot of corruption problems with Pi1. The only solution has been to stick to class 4 SD cards. Class 6 and 10 always result in corruption when overclocking in my experience.

I’m afraid that “everything but the CPU is identical” means that the problems with corruption on overclocked devices will remain. :-(

This sounds fantastic and the same price as the old much less powerful one. Feel a bit let down.I am not very computer experienced but I checked the FAQ’S before buying a B+ for my grandson before christmas and there was no indication of this, said they would be working on software not better models for a couple of years. This release immediately after christmas buying season seems a bit of a con trick from what I thought was a trustworthy organisation so they could move what was going to be outdated stock. A christmas present that has had the shine taken off it within a month.

Your grandson’s B+ will carry on being just as much fun regardless of the new product, as will all the others out there. It wasn’t a trick, we promise – we don’t sell products directly ourselves or carry any stock (instead, our official distributors manufacture and sell it under licence). At the risk of shocked looks from my colleagues, I don’t plan to get myself a Raspberry Pi 2 any time soon – I’ve got a Model B+ and an even older Model B Rev 2, I’m very happy with them, and I’ve got plans for both!

How come I cannot order via RS components anymore as a private user? Only company customers are accepted… I remember ordering my first Pi a while ago via them without any problems.
Element 14 website is down at the moment, so where can I get one?

How does Windows 10 Fit in with the RaspberryPI Foundation primary educational mission? Wasn’t the fact the Microsoft had most of the UK education system sewn up and the kids where being taught how to use Word/Excel etc part of the problem in the first place?

@rudi .. It’s an armv7 so yeah. I got Kitkat running on the original PI, Just need to fix up the gralloc to free it’s memory properly

There are many reasons that ICT lessons in UK schools in the last 15 years often defaulted to using Office but an digital oligarchy wasn’t one of them. (The 1997 Stephenson report + government action/inaction since has a lot to answer for.) On the other hand, we do know that having a wider choice of software and hardware in schools improves teaching and learning — it’s why we make the Pi :)

Will it be (err… IS IT) compatible to bare-metal level?
Will i.e. PiFox etc run on it out-of-the-box?
Or do hw-addresses expected kernel-adress etc shift with the new CPUs and all?
Does anyone know or have tried that?

Eben and I talked about this during his interview for Make:, http://makezine.com/2015/02/02/eben-upton-raspberry-pi-2/. Apart from switching out the 700MHz ARMv6 core for a quad-core 900MHz ARMv7—and the few missing ARMv6 instructions that weren’t used—this is going to be hardware compatible with the existing Pi’s out in the wild.

Thanks for the answer. Yes, I mean the desktop version of Minecraft. It’s actually a Java program, and it works fine under Ubuntu Linux. The breaking point has always been the computing power and memory requirements, but that might no longer be so… well, gotta try it. My new Rasperry Pi is ordered already :-)

Nothing against Minecraft Pi, BTW. It’s a great educational (and fun, too!) software, but it’s a lot more educational and a bit less fun than the “full” desktop Minecraft :-D

Sorry to be negative on this fabulous news but I’m really worried about the Windows 10 support. Do you not think that newcomers to the Pi will simply see Windows 10 use that and not try any of the flavours of Linux?

I’m a Software Engineer and have been using Unix/Linux since 1990 (I do also use and develop for Windows) but we have members of our team that have never tried Linux. They are increasingly out of their depth as more Linux based machines are introduced into the business and their lives. We need more people in industry with Linux skills and I was hoping the Pi would give us that for the next generation. Your thoughts please, agree or disagree?

My initial reaction was similar – having maintained a few Windows boxes at home over the years, I could never see what people liked about it, and started using Linux as soon as I could afford a PC of my own to run it on. Plus, as with smart ‘phones, I can’t see any advantage to being able to run viruses on a Pi.

HOWEVER, I have thought for some time that Microsoft have the potential to produce some good software given the right motivation – they are a business after all, and will at least try to adapt, and they have a lot of resources. If they’re genuinely willing to dip their toes in the free & open water, I think they should be encouraged.

yes completely compatible.
obviously if you have a metal case that uses the case as heat-sink there may be the issue that the SoC is somewhat lower, and the RAM on the bottom won’t use the case as heatsink, but for all other intents you can use any B+ case for the PI 2 B.

Not completely compatible. “Some” (which?) PiBow B+ cases with narrow fitting layers around the old chip won’t fit around the new chip. From Adafruit:

The physical changes include:
* Processor chip is larger, has moved slightly
* The RAM is now soldered onto the bottom of the board (no longer PoP)
* Other components and chips are moved around slightly to make space for the larger processor and RAM chip on bottom
This means that 99% of cases designed for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ will work with the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. This includes the Adafruit B+ Pi cases. One exception is some Pibow cases which have a layer that has cutouts for the specific location of the processor. Pimoroni has informed us that they will have a new case design that is compatible with both. Check the description of any case to make sure it is compatible with both Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

If you provide this unit power via usb and obtain a suitable class micro SD and install a Kodi distribution on this hook on an IR adaptor will this run Kodi with audio and video over HDMI? Or does it need something else? Congrats on the new unit looks great I’ve never used one before and want to get started! Also I’m curious how do you turn it on and off! :)

I have Kodi running on OSMC (Alpha 3) running on an original 256MB model B. I have a media centre remote control which came with a USB IR receiver – which works as well, all my videos are streamed as Ethernet over powerline (also works with external USB disk drive).

You can software shutdown the OS, but it still leaves the Pi powered up. I now use an Energenie IR remote control socket to turn the power off for the TV and the Raspberry Pi together so neither is left in standby when not in use.

What exactly is the benefit of this backward compatibility? It would have been no big deal to include a driver for a dedicated LANCE into a kernel.
I have switched to Banana Pro already. The lack of a dedicated Ethernet interface at 1 Gbit/s and a dedicated SATA interface were the main reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Raspberry 2 is DOA.

I had some issues with original Pis, minor USB problems and the hardware I2C not supporting repeated start condition properly. Is the Pi2 using exactly the same I/O blocks or something compatbile but better?

I’ve been using the Raspberry Pi as a media player and didn’t have many comments on the “old” model.
But I hope Raspberry in the future will move to support 1G ethernet, HDMI 1.4 and TrueHD / DTS-HD passthrough and maybe playback of 4k UHD content.
I’ve ordered my Pi 2 B this morning so looking forward to see what improvements this model will bring.

Great idea on keeping the now open GPU and general board design. One of the remaining limitations of the Raspberry B/B+ is it’s slow ethernet that is both 100 Mbit/s I’m assuming this is not being changed with the Raspberry Pi 2?

Here in Denmark the net. price excl. delivery and VAT is 190,- DKK (recently reduced from 194,24 DKK) for the model B+, where the price for the model 2 is 227,19 DKK – in other words the model 2 is 19,6% more expensive.

And we saw the same with the model A+ claimed to be 20% cheaper, but the price did not drop a cent compared to the A price.

I think that it is damaging to RPi’s credibility coming with these claims that are not true.

I do not have at problem with the price as such (and it makes no sense converting the price for at product produced in UK first to US$ and then back to Danish DKK), but what I do raise objections to is the statement that the price is the same as the old one, when it definately is not.

If the statement instead have been that the RPi 2 would be approx 20% more expensive than the B+, I would have considered it much more honest.

You don’t need a calculator to know that the old Pi was $35 and the new Pi is $35. That’s a 0%, not 20% difference.

What third party distributors then charge is nothing to do with the Foundation, and if someone is overcharging, then go somewhere else. You should be able to get them for $35 plus tax and shipping, exactly as was the case with PiMk1.

Thanks James. While I know nobody promised Android, we all hold out hope. For me Linux is fine but taking a broader look, Android would help increase penetration, desire and enthusiasm. Just my 2cents. While chipsets are not the issue your own posts point out the now defunct Android 4.0 project was in part to build the HW acceleration libraries needed to make things work more smoothly on the back end. To that end, I think honestly this should be re-approached, perhaps someone at Google under NDA with Broadcom would be willing to help?

A cross post of my comment over at Make with Eben’s interview about the Pi 2.

They exist to get kids programming, and that is a noble goal, yet they continue to pass over Android. I understand there has been difficulty getting video acceleration working but think about this.

If I make a proprietary programmable toaster but the code only runs on the toaster, then the benefit of getting someone to learn how to code on it is limited, the kids will see it and go, “Oh, yeah I can make this do some cool stuff”. But only other people with that toaster can use what I have done.

Give them the ability to learn to code on a device supporting Android and many more will want one, so they can make apps for their (and their friends) phones. Being able to code on a standard Linux platform is a great skill, but from the mind of the youth, being able to code something they can share with others, who don’t have the Pi Passion(and hardware), that would be priceless and bring a whole new level of enthusiasm to the mix.

I not convinced Android gives any advantage in education. You need a fairly big machine to build for Android, a Pi2 would struggle immensely. So you need a PC for the build environment, and deploy to a Raspberry or other Android device.

Add to that the specific Java used for Android apps, and the benefits are few and far between.

You learn much more on a Linux device – Linux command line, any language you want (including Scratch), most of the entire Linux application repos is available.

May I point out that the Model B+ page on this very site was mentionning “this is the final hardware evolution of the project idea we had”.

Based on this I bought mine 2 weeks ago with cam and case and for sure I would have prefer this one as it can run Ubuntu.

I am happy that the Raspberry Pi exists, I am happy that a project like this progresses, for the kids it targets and for the community built around it, but I feel very frustrated that this has been kept as a secret, and even more by the incorrect statement in the model B+ page that lead me to buy a B+ two weeks before a “6 times more powerfull” pops out.

The Foundation never announces stuff like this ‘upfront’ because if they did the shelves would be full of older models that are difficult to sell. It’s a shame that there are people out there who have just bought B+’s but I am afraid there is not much that can be done about it.

The B+ was the final evolution of the Bcm2835 version. It has always been accepted that there would be a replacement device at some point – that point is actually a couple of years earlier than previously predicted.

I would like to make a couple of comments on this new development – having worked with Pi’s since they first appeared.

I currently own 7 Raspberry Pi’s going back to an early first generation Model B, Model A’s and Model B+’s. I also am the main Pi support engineer in Kirklees College I.T. Department here in West Yorkshire.

I think its quite a good move to be able to offer a Windows 10 development environment – as this will allow the development of core apps that run under Windows 10. This should in theory (and I cant wait to test the theory) – allow one to craft Windows 10 apps that will be able to run with a Windows Domain Account enabled – making the Raspberry PI’s into native domain devices – anyone working in a big Windows Domain environment will know what I am getting at.

This will in my opinion legitimise the Pi as a piece of hardware within a CORPORATE environment – which may open up a whole new market place for Ebden’s new baby. I am already considering a Windows 10 based Kiosk system that can be used by students in our Libraries / Learning Resources Centres – and I can also see opportunities for low cost digital signage solutions here in the College. The fact it will be running Windows means I DON’T have to fight with my I.T. Department to justify purchasing NON windows capable devices – I can just point out “its like a ‘bare bones’ Surface Tablet” – and hopefully the “powers that be” further up the food chain wont have any alarm bells ringing over my purchasing non standard hardware :-)

In addition the ability to support Ubuntu will also open up larger worldwide educational markets as well. All this is only going to encourage NEW people / organisations / corporations to consider investing in Pi hardware, people who considered the Pi to be not mainstream enough will now be thinking – differently now it can run Windows.

All in all I think this sees a step change in the size of the global marketplace for the Raspberry Pi – all in all its a superb move.

Interesting interview from Make, but the sound quality defies description, abysmal doesn’t even begin to cut it. Eben’s voice (which is very good in a proper recording) veers randomly between shouty and speaking from the bottom of a bucket of custard.

Thank you! This is so amazing! February 2nd is my birthday and this is my favorite present and I am so happy the the pi foundation released this amazing board on my birthday! I will remember this the rest of my life!

I know this may be an unintelligent question, but will you be able to control the GPIO pins with Python on the new Raspberry Pi in Windows AND Ubuntu? Or will you just be able to control them in Ubuntu?

Not happy about the Windows-thing going on here…The article (and not only this one here) states how “we want to make Raspberry Pi more open over time, not less”. Most of the hardware is de facto close source and pretty tightly guarded (ARM, Broadcom etc. hopefully ring a bell here). Okay, I can live with that. Further we go along the line of all the propietary firmwares and drivers without which the Raspberry Pi will be just a pile of useless junk since considering the lack of information there is no way (none that I know of) of writing a completely open source equivalent of those. But on top of that you now want to provide Windows as an alternative to Linux on this platfrom. Yes, open source is also about being able to make the choice but Windows is omho a HUGE step backwards from what the goal is claimed to be. At least don’t pretend what your goal is. Don’t get me wrong – I love the fact that there is a Raspberry Pi but making open source (both hardware and software) the main slogan is just rediculious.

You don’t want Windows? Fine – don’t use it. Is Linux or any other OS going to suffer on the Pi because it’s an additional option – I very much doubt it. Will the educational goals of the Foundation going to change because of it? Certainly not……
Texy

Great news! Do you know when it will be available to a online store that ship to Canada? I got the B+, great device but CPU is always 100% when playing a movie. This one will be better and I could use by B+ at something else :)

Good new on hardware side, very bad on software one with Windows 10! I’m sure M$ will be able to shift our students from a open platform friend to knowledge (the source code is available to study, learn and change) to the “next generation of closed source producers” that will use tools of M$ and will want them once grow up.
I think the educational goal of the foundation is almost dead, with a slow path started with proprietary minecraft, mathematics, the “store” etc..
Sarcasm on: will not be great use M$ Win10 at school and have it at home and in the smartphone? Yeah, who cares about educate children to freedom and be able to build the digital world themselves?

I do, and do you realize how things are going to go? I’ve seen the raise of M$ monopoly from the beginning, and I know how hard is educate people to value freedom and use their brain, against have the next M$ Whatever or iSomething that knows what you want much better than you.
Do you really think that having M$ on Rpi will be an improvement to achieve user’s freedom (as software users, is not “freedom of choose”) and have children dig and use more Free software that is the only one compatible with education? Putting secret code in their hands, a clear path to the “usual world” that the foundation said wanted to change looks very silly to me. Children don’t know anything else that M$ Windows or MacOS, is what they expect when they turn a computer on, they expect to have a “store” and apps to download and use without having any idea that they can’t control them, or what they really are. If they will have the choice, what they will choose? The OS with plenty of familiar apps, or the one that preserves their freedom? On your opinion, having Win10 on Rpi is going to improve their freedom and knowledge or reduce it? Will we have more people involved in free software having M$ Win10 on the Rpi?

My collection so far:
x2 Combined networked doorbell and automated RGB LED porchlight (Internet of things begins).
x1 Giant 6ft long bighak (lifesize working version of the beloved 80’s bigtrak).
x1 Wifi 3D printer server.
x1 Gifted to a friend so they can get into programming.
x1 Research machine to help REMAP control a kindle via voice to aid the disabled.

The new one… would love to continue my handheld kinect based 3D scanner project, but being honest, it’s going to become my minecraft server!

Will faster CPU affect somehow ethernet transfer? For now in model B when copying something over ethernet CPU gets 60-80% usage because of the kworker process. With more powerful CPU maybe it would be a little faster?
I know that backward compatibility is the most important for you, but damn – I would really love gigabit ethernet in Pi, it would be just perfect machine :)

I’m sad to see Windows 10 as a “selling point” though. This community should not be supporting restrictive proprietary software… The Pi is about tinkering and making things while Microsoft is about marketing and spying.

The primary role of the Foundation is to bring cheap and open computing into schools and the education system, for that they have succeeded extremely well and should be applauded.

But education and the ability to program computers should not be subject to the whim of evil corporations, in their first exposure to computers, kids should be taught to use open and free tools exclusively such that it doesn’t matter whether or not they or their parents can afford to pay a Microsoft tax, or indeed want to.

If Microsoft want to crowbar their bloated and proprietary operating systems onto Raspberry Pi then I guess that’s their right, but the Foundation should not be assisting them in doing so.

Let’s not forget that the vast majority of important programming tools in Linux are Open Source and have Windows equivalents. Therefore if a kid later on wants to run those tools in Windows, so be it, but that’s then his or her choice.

Until that point, there should be a clear distinction between education and corporate profits.

1. Our education focus is stronger than ever – we have a team of people writing resources and training teachers.
2. By definition of the way the Raspberry Pi Foundation is formed, any profits made from the sale of Raspberry Pi goes towards our own education mission or to those doing other education projects through our Education Fund.
3. The Windows 10 image for Pi will be an IoT platform for developers – not a Windows desktop and certainly not replacing anything we do using Linux in education. Raspbian will continue to be the recommended and fully supported OS for general use and use in education.

That’s great news!
I still am using my Model B 256mb so I’m pretty sure to order as fast as possible.
Unfortunately I’m located in Belgium and the Belgium distributor doesn’t seem to have knowledge yet of the new Pi 2.
I know this is rather a logistics issue than a something concerning the foundation, but does anyone have an estimate when the Pi 2 will be available internationally? (seems RS still has them, but the Belgian site of RS only accepts companies with VAT number to buy).

I wish raspberry could partner with someone like amazon or newegg. They both have fantastic customer service. I would like to order one of these today but neither of the etailers offers paypal payments or live chat support.

I bought two of the original Model B rev 2.0 boards, and they both have “Made in the UK” printed on the PCBs, so this is not true. Can we get an official response on whether the Raspberry Pi 2 is made in the UK or not?

That’s interesting. I contacted a reseller in the UK, and they said the boards that they have say “Made in the UK” on them. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you are saying that they all say “Made in China” on them, even though they are assembled in the UK. Is it possible to purchase Raspberry Pi 2 B’s that say “Made in the UK” on the circuit board? If so, what suppliers in the US will have them?

Read the post, bought the PI2, then re-read the post just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming! I actually bought my first PI (a PI1B+) at Christmas and I’m MORE THAN HAPPY for this to be out now because at this price, my old one will be soon fitted to a robot, or running a NAS, or controlling my TV, or connecting my caravan alarm to my phone, or being used as an infra-red time-lapse camera or………..

A massive well done the the Raspberry PI Foundation. You guys are an inspiration.

Nice bump in specs, but disappointing that there is still no SATA support. SD slot as a hard drive is just unusable over time. I’ve tried many different SD cards, sizes, manufacturers and they all eventually fail after a few weeks of uptime.

This is awesome news – can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. I’m especially interested to see the performance improvements that will come for the Mono framework and Monodevelop on the Pi now we have ARMv7 … I personally see a native ARMv7 Mono build as a better route to Cross Platform development for existing windows developers than the Windows 10 IoT release!

Interesting, but not sure how much of a boost the new CPU will be given that my Pi is already clocked at 900Mhz. Okay Arm7 probably runs quicker than Arm6 at same clock speed. Surely the things that will see the main improvment will be things that can exploit four cores, Perhaps it will become clearer over time which things can and which things cannot.

Running something like LXDE shows massive improvements – all those threads running to update the display, run the little widgets etc can run over different cores, meaning your main app, even if single threaded, now has a whole core to itself. That’s 15% right there. Add the additional cache, NEON instructions, cortex-a7 optimisations and you should see a decent benefit.

Very happy to see the upgrade in processor and memory; however, at the same time was saddened to see that NIC and USB were not upgraded too. Really wanted to see a 10/100/1000 NIC and USB 3.0/3.1 for new version; data throughput has been a substantial hurdle for me, I guess it will continue to be a drawback.

That would require chip level support. The Bcm2636 would have taken at least a year more to get those added and would cost more as a consequence, then add on to that the software development time. Going to a completely different chip would break all the current projects (and there are 4.5M mk1’s out there, a big market you don’t really want to hurt), so not an option.

I don’t really see how adding USB 3.0 would break past Pi projects since USB 3.0 is by design able to step down to USB 1.0/2.0 speeds if necessary.

Same for ethernet – if you can go 1000, then why not, and if an older project can only run 10/100 then it’ll step down as it’s designed to do that.

As for time to code all that – I concede that would take time, but the hardware part shouldn’t be that much of a hurdle due to how NICs and USB is supposed to handshake and talk at the slowest necessary speed.

Great to see and read all you all have worked for turning out so well for you and workers/hobbiests/tinkers/HTPCers etc around the world.

The issue is not what you connect to USB/ethernet. You’re right, the bus will step down and remain compatible.

The issue, rather, is the software driving the USB3/gigabit hardware implementation. USB is integrated in the Broadcom SoC, so for USB3 you would need a different chip. Maybe the Broadcom folks would be able and willing to rework the SoC USB just for the Pi. Maybe you’d be forced to a different SoC altogether. Either way, you would at the very least have a new USB stack requiring new software to drive it.

The Pi’s ethernet interface works off the USB bus. A gigabit interface on USB3 would work, but again you’d be looking at a different ethernet chip – and thereby also a different USB hub, since both are integrated on the same chip.

By the time you’ve done all that, you’ve basically created a new hardware platform that would certainly take a while to reach the level of stability, maturity and support that is such a distinguishing feature of the Raspberry Pi.

Linux Mint does not currently provide a version for arm and have no plans to as far as I’m aware. So to create a version for the Raspberry Pi would involve building it all from source which would be a very big undertaking.

Ubuntu has had a ARMv7 image for some time and the reason it wasn’t on the Pi before is because they’d made the decision not to use ARMv6 which is the processor on the previous versions of the Pi.

The version currently available for the Raspberry Pi is the Snappy Ubuntu Core, which is specific version of Ubuntu created for cloud platforms, IoT and as the basis for the Ubuntu phone. Ubuntu even provide a guide to porting to other devices “Snappy for Devices porting guide”.

I expect that Raspbian will continue to be the default OS that most people use, but Ubuntu Snappy Core provides another option which I think is going to be interesting.

I bought a Pi last week (A+). I was planning to do a retro portable console so the form factor and the low battery usage were reasons why I considered it. So, is there any plan to release a Pi 2 A+ anytime soon? It would be awesome to have another extra USB and maybe beef up the RAM and processor a bit but otherwise, it’s perfect! Anyway, I’m kinda broke but I’m planning to get the Pi 2 soon, should be perfect as a media center.

Just want to say thank you for all the hard work you guys put into this project. Its very much appreciated that the Raspberry Pi project continues to grow. I’m sure over the next few months that we will see many more fascinating builds come out of this updated slice of Pi.

The ODroid-C1’s Cortex A5 core has 1.57DMips/MHz so at 1.5GHz you have a total of 2355DMips per core. Whereas the RPi based on Cortex-A7 (1.9DMips/MHz) at 900MHz has a total of 1710 DMIPs per core. Based on these theoretical values the C1 should still exhibit about 37% more performance.

Ofcourse this is all theoretical and based on marketing speak…only proper benchmarking will prove one to be more performant than the other. I personally have a C1 and have ordered an RPI2 as well.

Surprised and pleased by a new quad-core device so soon after the B+/A+. I ordered a few (In the USA, MCM Electronics said RP2 is both “coming soon” on the main page, and then on the order page “in stock”; but we shall see). Even if the old USB architecture hasn’t changed, the CPU improvement may make some USB video camera devices usable on model 2 that were not on the older model; we can hope. Maybe a single Pi2 can now support several USB cameras at once for motion detection, if the limit before was ‘motion’ % CPU, rather than USB bandwidth.

The rest are just hardware boards. RasPi is a revolution, a tidal wave, a community who want the world to realise you can have as much fun with and learn much much more with a £25 computer than you can with one 40 times as expensive.
Love what you’re doing Raspi foundation; evolving, listening and a constant stream of h/w and software answering our requests.
Love the community and how much I’ve learnt from the community and enjoyed surfing the Raspi wave.
I’ve a B+ in a robot, another in a Kodi/OSMC media controller and just ordered a 3rd for tinkering today. You’ve just made a £25 computer so cheap and powerful we masses can give one to the children, teach and learn ouselves!

Oooouh you can’t imagine how happy this makes me! i was lookin’ for a more powerful replacement for my raspberry pi which i used as Homeserver (Media/Web/Light-home-automation) and in turn would use my old pi for developement. But there was no board that suited my needs.

Besides !THE PRICE! the compatibility is the best aspect. plus i can be sure that there will be a huge community that can help me out.

Any idea what the power consumption is? I know part of the original selling point of the original Pi was how low powered it was. (About the cost of a burger from a fast food outlet to run it for a year I think.)

That’s great news, excellent work guys ! It was just two days ago that I ordered my first RPi B+ and I am eagerly waiting for it to arrive ! As soon as I get the hang of it I’ll keep it for my standalone alarm project and then I’ll order the new RPi2 to start another couple of projects ! Thank you very much for enabling us to delve into the beautiful world of programming, learn new things, and help us create our very own “smart” devices !
Greetings from Greece, keep up the good work !

How could you partner with Microsoft? You’ve let us all down. The whole point of the Raspberry Pi was to teach kids to code. Now they get Windows. Yay! Let’s teach them C#, which lets face it is the worst language in the world. How are we supposed to teach are kids about code and open source on a closed source operating system for people who don’t care how computers work? I am really surprised at this and won’t be buying another Raspberry Pi because of this.

Hey, it is a nice piece of news but now that you have fulfill all our expectancy about the raspberry pi, is it possible to ask you to improve your communication strategy, it is insuportable to announce a product the day you sell it.
People who just by one of the ancient version just feel robbed.
If you have announced that two month before, we’ll had the choice of waiting for the new pi or just buying one immediatly depending on our needs.
This new pi is nice but it is badly introduce.
Mayby you should propose an exchange for those who buy a pi last month ….
Again thanks a lot for all your work and please do something about your com.
Sorry for my poor english, i am a french raspberry pi enthousiast.

Announcing on the general availability day isn’t such a bad thing, it certainly ensures the first batch of boards get bought on day one. As before with the B+ & A+ the secret was leaked (on the Register and SlashDot) some time before the official announcement. It was less bad with the PI2 than those two earlier announcements.

If you announce too soon in advance (before production of the new machine) you’d risk suffering from the “Osborne Effect”. That’s where the new machine’s specification (even thought it doesn’t really exist) outstrips the old machine by so many shiny bells and whistles that you end up with so much held inventory of the old machine that you drive your company into administration, receivership and oblivion before the new machine is ready.

It’s common for folks who bought a full price machine to feel they’ve been outdone, but as my economics teacher told me “You pay your money and you take your chance.”. If you don’t do that you’ll always be waiting for the new, better, cheaper machine.

Great news but of the four suppliers on the order page, one is unreachable, one is only able to ship in the UK and the other link is broken, pointing to a website in China that is effectively unreachable.

Allied Electronics has them in stock! But someone needs to tell them it’s spelled ‘RASBERRY’ without a P for Bob’s sake.

Are there any plans to get a second NIC on there? Seems like the hardware is now beefed up to be fast enough to run as a small firewall using Snort and would save on tons of electricity instead of a 1U rack server.

Regards the Windows 10 comment, it is not a full blown version it will be more like a basic Tablet Version and Microsoft not the RPF are supporting as an IoT Platform

Regards the comment regards Adobe Flash, Adobe themselves do not support on ARM platform, so tough, ask the crappy websites to offer HTML5 Videos, not for Flash Support in ARM Linux.

Regards Raspbian it already had an ARMv7 port, it was “tweaked” for the RPi ARMv6, so no issues there. If used Debian ARMHF it would not have full support for the Camera and future Monitor add-ons via the board connectors etal.. Admittedly in time more Linux variants will be available

I wll state again the only difference between the A+/B+ and RPi 2 B is the CPU/Memory……

There’s going to be a lot that. People will not realise that it isn’t a full desktop. There are probably many people who will go out and buy one, plug in their USB cd and wonder why their windows install isn’t booting.

On the other hand, I think that many kids will end up with one unexpectedly, be faced with the option to purchase visual studio or a free alternative and be swayed towards the free

Having 4-core SMP available from my point of view is a major win over the single-core when using the Raspberry Pi to teach computing. When updating the Raspian distribution for the new board, it would be great to include a package of gcc 4.9 patched with the Intel/CilkPlus parallel extensions:

Just curious, but why not call it Model C to prevent confusion with the Raspberry Pi vs.1 B/B+? Especially since you have no immediate plans for an A/A+ and seem focused to release a new compute module as the next step.

Here in the US, the approved vendor (MCM Electronics) is selling RPi-2 at the advertised $35 price (plus tax and shipping). I remember in the past, in some countries there was some import tax that was added to the base price(?) But in any case that is something you should raise with your supplier.

Well, it’s not as simple as saying “freedom to choose is fine” here. We all remember Microsoft anti-competition history and it’s a big company willing to spend big money to keep people away from alternatives to their products.

So it’s natural to see people worried about what they consider a threat to the project they helped to grow, especially when the foundation worked together with Microsoft to allow this.

Microsoft Windows 10 ? Why, Pi Foundation, how dare you give us more options which are, wait for it, optional ?! I won’t be buying another Pi just in case you offer me even more options and things to do with it. Bloody liberty.

smh

In related news, the Odroid C1 isn’t a fair comparison. I should know, I’ve got one. It’s sitting in a box waiting for the software to get up to scratch. I’m not holding my breath.

I wonder what will be the reaction of RasPI look-alike board supplier from Shenzhen (China). Their processor familly includes octa-core chips in both symetric and big.LITTLE configurations and they are not so restricted on price and existing user base. Also I’m waiting for direct comparison between BCM2836 and A20 used by RasPI and its look-alike.

The most important reason probably is that it would have broken backwards compatibility. For a gigabit network to be useful, you’d have to take it off the USB2 bus and integrate it into the SoC — or, alternatively, upgrade to USB3 (we can dream!) — likely forcing you towards a completely different SoC. They were clearly not prepared to write off the installed base like that.

I’m willing to bet that for most of us networking on the new Pi is faster anyway, seeing how a great many tasks used to be primarily CPU-bound.

I can´t really undestand how could anyone feel disappointed with these kind of news… We´ve been getting better hardware for the same price for 3 or 4 years now. It´s like buying the same cookies over and over only to find they´re getting tastier over time!

Of course I can understand the “and I had just ordered a batch of the old model!” feeling – in fact I ordered 1 B+ and a couple of A+ a few days ago, but hey, I´ll be getting exactly what I payed for! So keep up the good work (and move manufacturing to Perú so I can get new models without having to pay high shipping rates and wait for weeks for delivery! :D)

I just spent ten minutes doing my best flounder impression to my monitor. That just happened!? I suppose it was only a matter of time since we got wheels and a sandwich, but… wow. You’ve really out done yourselves this time!
#include

Fortunately for us, Broadcom were willing to step up with a new SoC, BCM2836. This retains all the features of BCM2835, but replaces the single 700MHz ARM11 with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 complex: everything else remains the same…

Therefore, SoC USB support is still USB2, and the hub/ethernet chip is still fed off that. Any improvement (and there will be some) will be simply due to raw CPU speed.

The version of NOOBS currently on our downloads page will work with Pi 2. There’ll be a minor updated version (v1.4.0) due out in the next week which should contain all the software from the previous Pi 1 image, all configured to work on the new hardware. The current 1.3 version contains the updated kernel for ARM v7 and most software has been ported – there are just a few extras to deal with.

Just ordered one from RS. They say NOOBS 1.4 is required and 1.3 is not compatible but they have sold out of 1.4 cards and linked to the Raspberry Pi downloads page but this page only has 1.3 (dated today). So, what do I use with it when it arrives later this week?

Only thing is, well, I just ordered my first Pi last week. I researched specifically to make sure I was getting the latest version.

This is still on your FAQ’s page:

7. WHEN WILL THE NEXT MODEL OF THE RASPBERRY PI BE RELEASED?

As of the July of 2014, an updated version of the Model B, the Model B+, has been released. Beyond this revision, which updated certain pieces of hardware without changing the main processor on the board, there are no immediate plans for the next model; a new model may be released in 2-3 years, but this is not a firm schedule.

So I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a sad panda right now for arguably selfish reasons. :-( May want to give the FAQ a sprucing up.

I have the article from last annual from Pi and you said there was going to be any new hardware upgrades, only the 4 usb ports added…. why the change? I would really like to have seen a Business version with 2 NIC’s.

The foundation has said before that they had not plans to release a new version, but I believe that was due the need to maintain backward compatibility and that there was nothing else that could be used and maintain compatibility.

From the blog post it says:
“Broadcom were willing to step up with a new SoC, BCM2836. ”

So it seams that Broadcom have provided the means to maintain compatibility without increasing price and providing a new better, faster Raspberry Pi. So it seams perfectly logical to make the change rather than continue to supply the old spec just because they had previously said (in good faith) that they didn’t have any plans for a new version.

I don’t believe that the Raspberry Pi foundation would ever deliberately decieve anyone and I’m sure that’s not the case here.

Here the same!
The Display was in the Pipeline before the V2. It was said that this will wait, now we have V2 and no display.
Why the rush to get V2 out? Why not change ethernet and some other things? And why before the display?
I’m wondering about the goal, is it yet the community and programming or changed it more to get quantities sold. If Microsoft is not involved in this, then it must be.
As well as now there is work on Win on the Raspberry, why that, is not the display more important?

I think this short announcement policy is not good, people support Raspberry Pi so they want to know
More about the development and happening in the HQ and on Raspberry Pi. Like it was when the first Pi was
Released. We don’t know anything on the display, which was planned so long. Give people some insight to
Your development….

Now that the soc is exposed it helps justify water cooling kits for those HARDCORE users.
Which leads to another point, under supercooled conditions the 2835 could acheive around 1.4GHz??? But was restricted beyond that At the gpu level???

So my question is, what could be thoretically possable with the 2836 under supercooled conditions and will it also have a similar sofware restriction?

I’ve started with Raspi B.
The second was a Banana Pi, because the speed of the Raspi was not enough.
Now, I’m back I’ve just ordered a Raspi 2.
SATA and LAN still could b a problem but lets see how it performs…

You probably will not find one under $40 for a little while;
what a few weeks or until the first rush is over, the price should come down some. When I bought my A+ I found amazon had the best price, but it isn’t on amazon yet. Can’t what to get a pi2 myself!

Hey guys, congratulations on a wonderful new device. I immediately put in an order for a few from Newark.

As the co-creator of Raspbian I very much welcome the quad-core ARMv7 as a good step forward for the Raspberry Pi. It’s even better that you’ve worked on making sure that the 4 million devices in users hands aren’t immediately obsolete from a software perspective. On our side we’ll do whatever we can do to help transition Raspbian forward so users continue to have the best Linux distribution available for their devices — regardless if they purchased Pi two years ago or two years from now.

As for Windows 10, it’s an interesting move on Microsoft’s part. I have a feeling that all the fretting about it in the postings above will in the end prove to be needless worry when we see how underwhelming in the end result will be. It’s obviously useful for embedded IoT devices in a Windows dominated corporate environment, but beyond that I think a competitive Linux based solution would have much greater flexibility. Despite the changes recently at the company, I’m very skeptical that Microsoft really understands the open source and Makers movement. I guess time will tell.

I’m happy to see another OS that will run on the Pi, but I’m not much interested in running Windows 10. I’m sure others will find uses for it, but I really love the work you’ve done with Raspbian and I’ll keep working with it.

Why was this a complete surprise? I was updating my Raspberry Pi, scouring the Net for news, etc. just a few weeks ago, then decided to buy an Intel NUC so I could have a bit more power (mostly more RAM!). I’m mostly interested in the quiet/efficient/low-cost PC aspect. It would have been nice to know this was coming. My research (early January 2015) concluded that there would be NO hardware upgraded PI before 2016 or so.

In earlier models, USB, Ethernet and other things were on the same bus to CPU (or something like that) limiting the throughput. As a result, USB 2.0 couldn’t operate at full speeds and I/O had speed limit. Is this situation any different here?

“Model B” is the $35 level board – and we added a B+ for the additions
“Model A” is the $25 level board – and we added an A+ (and reduced the cost to $20) for the additions

Raspberry Pi 2 contains a whole new chip – it’s a second generation Raspberry Pi, a much more significant difference. The difference between A and B is USB ports, ethernet and RAM. The difference between 1 and 2 is 4x cores, 2x RAM and over 6x speed and performance. There will be a Model B and (eventually) a Model A as before, with the new chip.

The naming convention is not broken – it continues with a numerical prefix :)

Imho Videocore IV is really showing it’s age now, it was impossible to have desktop OpenGL 4.x support on the original Pi and the issue has been dragged along here as well. You guys seriously could have considered a SoC that packs a modern GPU that at least supports OpenGL ES3.1 (GL4.3+ would be even better), It’s a real pain to have to dumb down our 3D applications to that restricted a and castrated legacy ES2.0 API when all the major players out there are readying adopting ES3.0+. Videocore IV on Windows doesn’t even support shader model 3.0/feature level 9_3 which is the absolute minimum API revision that most developers out there support. This is a terrible choice imho, you could easily have licensed the Mali IP from ARM and build your own ‘modern’ SoC without all that legacy Videocore stuff. It’s simply ludicrous to ship a product that features a GPU which doesn’t support SM5.0/FL11_0.

I guess 4.5 million sales so far proves that having the latest and greatest is not top of the pile for the vast majority of users or for educational purposes. I’m sure there is other hardware out there that will fit your purpose, perhaps for just a little more money…..
Texy

Ubuntu are providing their Snappy Core image, which runs well on Pi 2. It’s not a desktop image for general use – it’s a special server image for developers.

Having said that, there’s bound to be a suitable standard Ubuntu image that’ll also run on Pi 2 floating around somewhere. It won’t be as fly as Raspbian as we’ve done so much work optimising it for the hardware and Ubuntu desktop (particularly the Unity interface) is made for computers with more processing power and RAM. Perhaps a Lubuntu or Xubuntu image will work better.

Too bad the Pi2 doesn’t support either USB3 or eSATA… either of these (but specially USB3) would be just the ticket for what I want to do with it, ie, personal NAS.

More RAM and CPU is always nice, but the current Pi offers more than enough, so I think I’m gonna pass on the Pi2.

Let’s see whether the Pi3 offers anything in this regard.

Also, it’s disappointing to see Raspberry in league with Microsoft: this not only casts a shadow on Raspberry’s “open” (source/hardware) attitude, as MS and Windows is anything but, but also shows a kind of naivete that really worrying (not a single company in history has ever benefited from having anything to do with MS and Windows, much to the contrary: the “partnership” eventually destroys them, if not entirely at least in spirit. Just look at Nokia and Novell, to mention only two…

Everyone feels that the RPF are in league with M$ not so, M$ want to use the RPi as a development platform for Internet of Things and obviously that does not mean you will be installing a full verion of Windows 10.

The crucial word is development and if the people who splash “install Windows 10 on RPi” on Blogs would get their facts straight stupid comments would not be posted.

The same applies to Ubuntu, Snappy is an Internet of Things Development platform.

So yes if we teach kids to code on RPi giving them opportunities to find a career path which is relevant to what they have learnt is good.

You will find loads of information on the NET, but not everything is the full picture…..

Raspbian Operating System is still the backbone of the RPi, anything else is an alternative so if do not like the alternative djust ignore it.

Raspbian or Minibian ?
In IoT (Internet-of Things) you need a lot of boxes without screen, keyboard and GUI. A small LCD is many times more than enough.
Still you need a lot special IO. I’m using now Arduino here, but it would be great to get rid of the USB cable. The same goes with HD.

I have a basic doubt.. Can this Raspberry Pi 2 platform detect any USB device like how a normal PC does? To be more specific, I am looking to install Garmin Express and sync my Garmin Edge 500 through USB such that I can track and Save my workouts…

Not necessary for use in education – and would risk breaking backwards compatability and likely make the creation of the new chip take much longer, therefore not a priority or a good idea at this stage.

The new chip (2836) is exactly the same as the previous chip (2835) except for the CPU which has been replaced with a quad core 900MHz ARM7.

can’t find worldwide delivery.. specifically to Maldives. through some googling found one site that sells to maldives but it’s over priced. RS used to ship to Maldives when i bought PI 1 B, but now they don’t. i’m really itching to have one right now. To give my self a treat on my b’day :P but seems i’ll have to wait for sometime to get it here for a reasonable price.

We always intended to do a next generation model. Obviously MS had nothing to do with that – it was down to Raspberry Pi and Broadcom’s engineers. Not until we had functional boards out did MS get involved and offered to work on porting Windows IoT for it.

Same ‘ol Ethernet is a bummer, I agree. And I don’t immediately see how you could get a better one with a HAT – the I/O isn’t really designed for that. But at least it has Ethernet. Phew. So, off to Element14 I go. Right now :-)

Is Raspbian for ARMv6 (Raspberry Pi 1-st generation) going to be discontinued some time later? I ask because I bought Raspberry Pi B half year ago for home server and I want to know if I don’t wasted my money.

Not at all. Raspbian will continue to be the recommended and supported OS for general purpose in order to maintain backwards compatability with Pi 1 and to make the most of the huge effort to make it the best performance we can get out of the Pi.

The introduction of Windows 10 IoT and Ubuntu Snappy Core are additional optional choices limited to Pi 2 only – and they both have specific use cases in development. For general use and in education, we recommend Raspbian – and we’re not going to drop ARM v6 support as we have 4.5 million 1st generation Pis out there to support.

mSata? Oh come on. That is so last year. M.2 is the currently favoured way of adding a future solid state drive.

More seriously, I bet there are loads of people who will ditch their Pi 1 and replace it with a Pi 2 and would quite happily send their Pi 1 to a freepost address. These could then be redistributed to more worthy causes rather than end in cupboards or be discarded. Alternatively they could be tested and sold much cheaper as refurbised with the profits going to the Pi Foundation to be spent wisely.

Is there not a case of providing a suitable envelope with every Pi 2 purchase for those who want to see their Pi 1 reused? I realise that the complete setup would take some organising and could not be undertaken lightly but the benefits could be substantial.

I just installed my very first Raspberry Pi (B+) with OpenELEC and hooked it up to the TV.

No trouble. Not even one teeny tinsy bit of a problem. Such a great, great little machine. And I got the package with all the electrics tinkering stuff, so I’ll be sure to get back to a hobby I haven’t kept up with for almost a decade.

You guys have created an incredible, incredible thing! All my machines run Linux, why would my media center run something else?

As has been repeatedly stated, in so many places I’ve lost count… The reason Dollars are used is because the raw materials are ordered in Dollars. With currency fluctuations, to use Sterling would be impractical as the price goes up and down.

I would’ve thought that bringing production to the UK would’ve been evidence enough that the Foundation truly supports the UK economy. The Pi was born in the UK, is made in the UK and is supported from the UK.

The components we buy are priced in dollars, and we negotiate manufacturing in dollars. Because currency markets are so volatile, we price the final board in dollars too so we don’t have to keep changing the price.

Exciting news!. Congrats and thank you very much for your commitment and continous hard work!. Keep up with that!.

Now, is it me or you have been particulary silent about the fact that the raspberry pi 2 was coming ?. It’s something it catches my attention. If you agree with me on this, was there any particular reason to be silent about this?. No criticism intended, just wondering! :) .

Though about binning this post as its basically a waste of bandwidth, but thought everyone else might like a glimpse of the sort of thing that’s been arriving.

To the OP – MS are doing the port, with some very minor help from the Foundation. So I suppose that is ‘support’, but its not affecting the core business of getting Raspi’s and education out to the world at large.

It’s impossible to find in North America. Element14 is sold out and I keep getting server errors/request denials when I try to set up a notification for when it’s in stock again.

I’m patient and in no hurry to upgrade my 1st Gen Pi, but I can’t wait to get my hands on the Pi2. It seems like a vast improvement in terms of processing, and kudos for keeping the price point the same. That will only increase the popularity of this wonder board.

Nice, but I would still have liked to have a normal and dedicated power jack. It does not have to be anything huge, the ubiquitous 2.1 mm center positive DC jack would IMHO be a huge improvement, even it would only accept 5V DC.

(Having an internal DC-DC converter capable of using e g 6V to 15V DC would be even more convenient. Even more versatile would be a boost/buck converter accepting something like 1.2V to 28V, but the need for that capability is probably to small to justify its implementation.)

I would love to be able to power my Pi’s from regular wall warts. When it comes to stuff I use Arduino or other microcontrollers for, I find it useful to have access to both the higher voltage, say +12V DC from a wall wart, and the regulated +5V and +3.3V, to use with different peripherials.

In Europe, regular wallwarts are exactly what are used to power Pi’s, uUSB is mandated for all mobiles now I believe so there are lot of them about. I also use a uUSB cable attached to my laptop to power a Pi – not an option with barrel. Barrel connectors are too numerous in type to use – people might think its the right polarity and voltage just because it’s the right size. Bang.

Internal convertor for a voltage range would add too much to the cost.

WOOOO! This is incredible news! But seriously, you got the name wrong, it should be the Pi^2.

I got the Rev1 Model B at home, so of course I got one as soon as I can! I even went out and got a better case for my old Pi (Pimoroni doesn’t support it anymore, sigh) so no fears of the old one being trashed anytime soon :)

I can just imagine the possibilities with the beefier Pi in the classroom. Right off the bat, using the Pi^2 as a server with content, while the ‘old’ ones are still used as thin terminals. I think there was a Khan Academy setup like that.

And the fact that it is still $35 for a quad core machine? You guys are freakin’ wizards!

As for Microsoft working in the Pi^2, bring it on! Don’t see how it directly helps the education aspect of the foundation, but then again neither does Openelec.

Just one request guys: please don’t release a Pi^3 in the next year or so. My wallet won’t be thanking me ;)

Noticed some oddness with Minecraft and the Python API, compared to the model B. Minecraft seems to still be receiving commands from the API after the Python code has terminated.

As an example, I have code that renders a CSV file into Minecraft blocks. Previously the code would terminate once all the blocks had been rendered, but now the drawing continues quite some time after the code exits.

The functionality isn’t affected, it’s just a bit disconcerting, perhaps there’s some thread oddness now that there are multi cores.

The speed improvement is very welcome, coffee intake will be dropping now that the rendering is significantly faster.

I have a Model B that I’m using as a dev server that I want to replace with a B V2. I was wondering if I need to reinstall everything or can I just do a dist-upgrade, copy the SD card to a microSD card and boot straight from that? (The OS is installed on an external hard drive).

Will you please stop lying. The price of the B2 is the SAME AS THE B+. This is a FACT. It is $35. Look on RS or Farnel or any other main line supplier for the proof. I have no idea why you think this is not the case, but you are WRONG. It is $35.

We do not play by the rules of the American’s, we play by the rules of the world. The entire worldwide trade in silicon is in Dollars. So that is the best (and only) way to have consistent pricing. It really is that simple.

The Raspberry Pi is a UK designed, UK made product. The SoC itself, with its ARM cores (designed in UK) and GPU (designed in UK) is actually made where the huge majority of other chips are made, in the Far East (Taiwan), and paid for in dollars. That is the way of the world.

As for UK identity, I’m pretty sure the Pi is UK through and through. That’s enough identity for me.

458 comments and not one inquiring about how the new silicon was tested. Given this is apparently the first deployment of the BCM2836 SoC, and the complexity scale of these systems it seems possible there might be something unexpected, but I guess that is a testament to the team that everyone assumes it all just works!

It went through the same sort of testing as any Brcm chip – I think this has been covered elsewhere. First silicon was some months ago – its been fairly well tested since them. Rather impressively, there were few if any faults found on the alpha silicon, which is one of the reasons the Pi2 is here now!

Thanks for that, I saw “BCM2836 silicon bringup” on vimeo with the spinning teapot demo, but did not know how long ago that was. I gather ‘2836 is a combination of the established Cortex A7 and the balance being the well-understood BCM2835. Still the combined system seems substantially complex, so I imagine thorough testing is quite a task.

Interesting, critisism is not allowed, and critical posts are being censored away.

You can claim from now on, and until judgement day, that the price is the same, which the entire computing press in the world have been swalling raw, but the plain fact is, that in half the world this is not true.

I suspect if this $35 fact was not true, then the worlds computing press would have noticed by now? As it is, only you seem to have noticed it, and not the 50k people who have bought one. So, who do you think is right here? 50k people and the worlds press, or you?

Of course, presenting some evidence of your claim would go some way to support your claim, but I haven’t seen that yet.

I tried to answer Liz, but apparently the answer was lost due to congestion, so I bring it again:

Hi Liz.

No I am not trolling, but as said, which I hope you understand, is that when you say that the price is not changed, the entire computer press globally brings the statement.

Unfortunately the simple fact is that in large parts of the world this does not happen to be fact, wherefore I would appreciate that you take this fact into considerations when you make press releases, and instead say that the price will not be drastically increased (give and take 20% depending on country) – and maybe the fault lies with RS not following the price structure globally, but then I would hope that you could bring this up with RS.

And besides that, some of my post were only suggestions for improvement, but some were also trying to explain that there is difference in how the American price compared to the price that is faced by EU citizens (apparently excluding UK ), and probably other places in the world (eg. RS in Australia takes 43,18AU$ for the model2, but 38,00AU$ for the B+).

—

And to answer you, as you can see from above, there are differences in prices, and as said, maybe RS is to blame, and with regards to the world press, they just says the the price is not changed, because the press release says that 35US$ equals 35US$.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not see a problem in the fact that a better product actually is more expensive, but I acknowledge the fact that it gives a lot of frustration in the “non US$ countries” when the users discovers that the price is increased.

And other European manufactures of electronic devices who also sources in the far East do not face any problem with fixed European pricing.

I really don’t know how many times it can be said. The price is $35. On top of that you will need to convert to local currency, add tax and postage, to give you the final result. If that doesn’t come out to about $35 (given the vagaries of exchange rates, and noting that the price will be based on what the product cost the supplier to import at the time of import, rather than exchange rate at time of end user purchase), then you really need to look to a different supplier. But the recommended price, exclusive of tax and delivery, is $35. This is NO different from the previous model, the exact same things applied to that as well. It was $35, the 2B is $35.

Also note, that right now, some resellers are DISCOUNTING the B+ to less than $35 in order to shift them, since they are now less good value. So they are being sold for less than $35, not the 2B being sold for more.

Ordered from RS components, it was “in stock” at time of ordering, money taken, now being told it wont be available until after the 10th or possibly after 23rd. RS are useless, think I’ll cancel the order!

I was please to see the VFP supports hardware double precision (64 bit) floating point – the documentation implied it was single precision only for an armv7 with neon.

A 16,000 line C compilation took 30 seconds on the Pi 2, 95 seconds on a B+. A larger build using “make -j 4” to use all the cores would benefit much more. Fantastic! Thanks!!!!! And it feels snappy to use!

I thought the B+ was a truly inspired upgrade design. This is too. There are some clever people in the foundation.

Don’t worry, you shouldn’t have to wait long. Both RS and Element 14 were inundated with orders yesterday and luckily, Sony are producing 20,000 units per day in the factory in Wales which will be distributed as swiftly as possible.

I hope Broadcom saw fit to change out the 16GHZ SDCard interface to one of the newer bigger SDHC 32Ghz or SDXC interfaces. These are ASIC cores that are transparent to the actual software and mostly the hardware except you can put more on board and they have better timing.

I hope one day to be able to replace a Windows Active Directory domain controller with a Raspberry Pi 2, if that were possible… with so many people moving their computing to the cloud, in a Windows environment, basic user account authentication still works best of the AD is on the local network. A low-cost, low-power solution to this would be awesome!

You should be able to run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to get the new kernel installed on your existing SDCard in your existing RPi model 1B.

Get the new machine, clone the card and it should boot first go with nothing else needed.

All ARMv6 code will run on ARMv7 so it’s upwards compatible, the SoC and USB/Ethernet hardware are plug compatible. The difference is that code that’s explicitly compiled for the ARMv7 chip won’t run on your old RPi. It is not downwards compatible.

Tomorrow I should be able to confirm that as I’m expecting delivery of my RPI2.

Full Minecraft isn’t just pure Java. It’s Java plus JNI. The source code for Minecraft is closed so there’s no way to port the JNI (Java Native Interface) pieces. Those pieces exist for the parts of Minecraft where pure Java is too slow and therefore wouldn’t be useful in an X86/X86_64 emulator (even if that were possible).

You’ll have to ask Mojang/Microsoft to create a special build. While you’re there ask them for a refresh of the Minecraft Pocket Edition that we’ve got on the RPI1.

How does the existence of a new version stop the old versions working exactly as before? People that bought a B, or B+ yesterday are getting exactly what they click on the ‘buy this’ button for. The fact that there is now an even better Pi does not damage them one whit.

It’s hard to get lunch for much less than the cost of a Pi. I’ve seen people whining about demanding a free replacement, about how it doesn’t include a GazillionGB and Zettabit ethernet. And of course, it shamefully include No Pony, not even a pink one.

Better to recommend “sudo apt-get upgrade” to save on bandwidth at this time. This is sufficient to get your B2 to boot, but excludes a handful of big packages (Mathematica & Wolfram Engine inter alia). Grab those later when the servers are less stressed!

Hi James – what’s in the silicon that makes the 2836 clock faster than the 2835, for lower overvolt? Is it narrower lithography, or some other? I remember Dom saying the foundry had tweaked things in favour of speed at the expense of power consumption at the time of the B+ release. Is it more of that?

Congratulations! Does anyone have advice on how you upgrade and modify an existing image like Raspbian? We have a custom image for our robotics projects for the Raspberry Pi that need a custom image (link here). Any hints on whether we’ll need to release an entirely new image to make this work with the Pi2?

Seems like I’m not the only one where RS have taken my order and money but can’t now deliver. Feels like deja vu as I had this problem when the Pi first came out. Hoping that the wait will only be a couple of weeks not months like last time …

Also, does anyone have precise power measurements of the new board compared to the B+ board? At idle what is the current draw? How does the maximum current draw compare with all 4 cores and the video core running full out?

I ordered my Pi2 yesterday from RS, having had trouble doing an online purchase (due to my card not RS) I phoned and the order was completed by a VERY helpful and extremely patient person given the volume of calls and orders being made yesterday.
The Pi2 arrived in my hands less than 24hrs after the order was processed.

I have NO complaints about RS or their service, only praise they have never let me down on any of my previous 3 Pi models since my 1st order on Launch day.

BTW Kudos to the Raspberry Pi Foundation on the new Whizzbang evolution You Guys are the best

Ordered up mine from RS … Looking forward to getting my hands on it ! Lots of posts are talking about cost/prices … It seems to me they cost 35$ but they sell for all sorts of prices because of taxes, choice of shop, speed/cost of delivery Import export issues? I once ordered a case from pimoroni and liked the paper bag it came in as much as the product! I can’t see that anyone is getting ripped off for a sub £30 bit of kit? Shop around .. theres no conspiricy!

Forums seem to be redirecting to the blog posting, don’t know whether the site is under heavy traffic.

Only a Linux noob in the grand scheme of things, but the Ubuntu snappy image has a problem.

It doesn’t have ntpdate installed so the system year is 1970 (because of the lack of RTC), which means that when you go to update snappy or install a package you get an ssl error because the time is wrong, overriding the date allows you to use the image (until you reboot).. I use > sudo date –set=”Tue Feb 08 20:11:55 UTC 2015″

Could someone look at this as the image is unusable at the moment IMHO.

1. Windows – if you don’t like it, don’t use it.
2. Windows – looks to me like its probably going to be a non-GUI “Internet Of Things” based OS version. You won’t be running browsers and office.
3. You ripped me off – no, the Pi you bought yesterday still does exactly what it did before the Pi 2 B announcement. I own 8 Model B’s and they haven’t stopped working. My investment in them has not become worthless – they still do the same job they were doing last week.
4. Price – seriously – can you read? $35 plus sales taxes, shipping and currency conversion. I can find them for $35, so can you. If your retailer charges more than $35 plus sales taxes, shipping and currency conversion, vote with your feet.
5. You didnt do “this” or “that” – your personal requirements probably came second to Raspberry Pi Foundations goals, timeframes, and target costs.
6. I need a free Pi 2 B because I bought an earlier model – are you even reading what you write before you click post?
7. Schools should get free replacement Pi’s because they bought earlier models – see above.

Many more examples…

All the Pi models are great. My first Model B rev 1 is still ticking along as a media center with huge uptime, and no new release has devalued any previous release in any way except for resale value on the secondhand market, which is just a normal fact of life.

I do understand what Christian is saying but i think it is imposible to do anything about.
He is from Denmark and i am from Sweden but i think its the same in many countrys.
The prize of the B+ has been holding steady for quite some time but the new pi2 sells for around 20% more.
The stores just sees an opportunity to make some monye, because they know that the first batch will sell out fast no matter what.

Ordered mine from RS yesterday noon as Element 14 were out of stock, cost more, but worth it I thought. RS said order would be despatched same day for Tuesday delivery.
Waited in all day Tuesday, at 17:15 got an email from then saying they were having problems supplying them.
Less than happy.

Ada fruit, pi hut, botland and other shop rise the price. If i buy to Poland at Farnel it will end up at $53

You have to incrase avaliblity, until then same cleaver seller will get as much as they can on Pi2 hungry consumers. Demand is now higher ther avaliblity so it is a simple way to grab quick money from market.

Ok I have had a couple of nights playing with the new Pi (sorry dudes work for a distributor).

My big thing is hardware and GPIO two notes to watch out for in these early day after the launch.

RPi.GPIO doesn’t work straight out you will need to download the latest version from sourceforge (check my blog)

and if you are programming in C or Python (haven’t checked any others ) you will find any Sleeps or delays will be longer in some cases up to 10%. this is easily fixed by setting any of the overclock options in raspi-config including none.

Schools in the UK are obliged by law to provide a “broad and balanced curriculum”. In a similar vein we are committed to providing a broad and balanced platform of hardware and software for computing, learning, making, exploring, teaching, engineering, hacking and creativity. “Open” does not just mean “open source”.

I’m too a little bit disappointed that Pi 2 doesn’t have SATA – even though it’s great otherwise, and bit congrats to that! SATA is on my wishlist – because I’d use Pi as a personal NAS with a terabyte disk, which is still cheaper than using USB based flash storage. And more reliable because of error handling (bad sector, etc.)

Could you make an official recommendation list for USB to SATA converters? I mean a stress test report. I’ve spent some whole days searching info on reliable SD cards to work with Pi, and eventually came to the conclusion that only Sandisk Ultra and Extreme would be low-risk. So it’s a bit of hassle to make a reliable Pi system. On the SD cards side because most of the SD cards controllers aren’t tuned for the threaded load and read/write scenario. On the SATA side because the bridges in the USB-SATA bridges aren’t tested and some older don’t handle disks >2TB

Pi 2 is entirely backwards-compatible with Pi 1. To achieve this, the chip architects at Raspberry Pi and Broadcom left everything alone besides the CPU – which they replaced with a quad core ARM7. Adding extras would have led to further complications and added an element of risk to the success of the chip.

Also, although some people would find SATA useful, it’s not important for use in education, which is why it wasn’t there in the first place.

That’s a good attitude! After all, Linux is all about having a choice.

Windows 10 will not be a desktop environment anyway so it’s not going to replace Linux.

We’ve put an awful lot of work into optimising Raspbian to run as well as possible on the Pi’s hardware. The hardware just got a whole lot better (or, four/six/whatever whole lots better) and those optimisations are still making a huge difference. Sure, you can probably run vanilla Debian but Raspbian provides an experience fine tuned precisely for Raspberry Pi.

Maybe it’s because you are taxing only one core of 4 at 100% load ? ;-)

The load is computed from all cores in a system, AFAIK. Even on a quad-core intel machine, I hardly load it more than 25% by browsing by Firefox itself. The browser would have to be multi-threaded (Chrome is believed to be done thread-frindly). Or I’m wrong and it really taxes the chip at 25%. But wait- there’s a way to know, look at a specific process (using top, htop commands) and see, if it’s running at 100% load. That way, you’d be actually running it at 100% like the Pi 1 , but you’d not use other cores.

It’s confusing, load of the system is sum of partial loads (100%=4 cores loaded), but load of a process is computed against 1 core (100% load = 1 core loaded).

Three years ago I bought one of the very first Raspberry Pis and now you bring out a brand new one for half the money that’s has a terrorHz and can run 19 times as good! It’s a disgrace! Is this how you treat your loyal fans? Imagine if I made dishwashers and YOU bought one and it washed your dishes really well and was economical and did what you wanted and then two years later I brought one out for the same price that had an “Add rinse aid” light and a 30 degree eco wash. How would you feel? Not so cool now is it? I may as well pay my wages straight into the Swiss bank account of a mad dictators WMD fund than buy your so-called “computer”.

You were to stupid you could not even give it SATA8 and a Meganet webplug so what is the use even Kumquat Pie has this and it only costs $99+VAT. You say I must pay $35 for another computer NOW when I can buy 2 “Chicken Legend with Cool Mayo” from a well-known fast food outlet plus a pair of stylish flight socks for that. I feel dirty like the Cat in the Hat when he leaves ring around the bathtub, but a greyish ring not pink.

As for ₥¥¢R0$0ƒ₮ (GEDDIT!) you have signed a contract in your pants with
Beelzebub and all his little Visual Basic Imps. They will go “chitter chitter… ‘Dim IsEvil As Boolean'” and it will always be set to “True” and then you will loose your pants and its not laughing matter with VB Imps all around.

My friend knows a man who lived by a hairdresser who once gave a headcut to a teacher (number 2 GEDDIT!) and the teacher said that he once saw in a ICT lesson (aka Bill Gates Foundation $ermon) a M$ Office come out of the screen with hoLOLens and suck a childs medulla oblongata straight out using a Macro and since then all he can do is Autoshapes in Po₩erpoint!!! Typing with his poor childs FACE! How can you team with that??‼ It’s not even right. I hate you Rasberry Pi and its Kumquat Pie all the way for me now.

I wonder, is anywhere out there some hardware, which uses the DSI interface? It’s for LCD displays, I’d like to see an LCD with this interface on top of my Pis, but unfortunately no real product there. And it’s only two-lane if I can remember right – hence for small resolution displays. Did engineers at Broadcom consider this and maybe added some more lanes to the design? Or would that seriously break the VideoCore IV, hence made it virtually impossible?

I’d not mind the small resolution though, had there been an actual LCD made for it and worked. :(

Otherwise, without an actual usable LCD, it’s a waste of space on the board. A fifth USB ports’ pins’ facing upwards would have been more useful for HATs with USB circuitry onboard, like a HAT with more ethernet interfaces.

How about HDMI going into screen blank, I mean, turning the HDMI off after a while for proper monitor sleep. I couldn’t get it to work on a RPI1, read somewhere it’s a hardware inability of the original BCM chip to do it. Any progress, workaround or hack with the new BCM chip? Or I’m completely mistaken and it works on RPi1?

Hello, Congratulations, I have a pi b+, is fantastic, I want a pi 2b. Know if was manufactured in Brazil? in South America timeout much, the price is around $ 80, for official mail stolen, I think if manufactured in brazil exchange a bit of that.

I suspect many of us with long memories who have been following the forum posts from the beginning are quitly chortling to ourselves. More or less every feature request denial has been fulfilled! I wonder what others will definately not happen (chortle chortle).

Oh mate, thank you. Didn’t know there was a free one. Not a big windows user other than at work and this will help. Guess MS is trying to stem the flow of developers that are moving away from traditional windows development. Next step, a free windows 10 developer edition? Wouldn’t expect it but it seems MS are opening up a lot more

Have you ever thought about what the education starts with? I mean, for some people the first contact with a computer is through some user-friendly system. Wouldn’t it be fine to have Android as an option – for people who aren’t attracted and addicted to hacking yet? For example, show the small kids that their TV can handle some more than play TV shows, that it can be interactive and then it CAN do some more stuff, if you reboot into some yet unknown environment with a big raspberry picture in the middle of the screen … ;)

On the other side of users, what about my parents (>70yrs), what about them? They can use RPi as well – connected to their TV or LCD, all the time, using a friendly interface and rich ecosystem. And then joining the best of both worlds – the UI from Android for example and programmability of RPi and I/O, some useful stuff could be made – I think for example about watchdog for old citizens, where some IoT wireless gadget could watch their health, if they’re ok, not dying on the floor with a broken leg. Yes, you could do it with a Raspbian, or XBMC based distro, but if they’d benefit from Android and other apps there….it could serve both purposes at once.

…just a few thoughts. I certainly think there’s some audience who would be attracted to RPi ecosystem just by the ability to run Android, and then,… some more.

It’s about UIs. And finally the RPI2 has the power to let some watchdogs running while serving the (user’s preferred) UI now. And I think under Android ecosystem some educational programs are there and are useful.

Some time ago, I was active in a community of people (only ~40000 in a 10M country) building community networks. And one of the goals was to supply people with own settopbox, connected to LAN which could play DVB-T TV (or IPTV), have some browser in it, and some more stuff. And RPi would have been the best for it, but the people (and many of them young pupils) expect some friendly interface. I then eventually stopped my efforts and the solutions fragmented, based around settopboxes from various manufacturers with friendly solutions, yet tragic programmability.

Isn’t the education of old people how to operate a decent Android UI an education worth educating? Without their fear that they f*k up something irreversibly? ;-)

Think again.

p.s. My neighbours have a child with a Down syndrome. And guess what – he explores the world through a tablet, even though he doesn’t understand most of it yet. For these and alike unlucky children, the education and learning means exploring some preset world full of educational videos, applets. Some Android based distro with educational content for a home TV wouldn’t serve anybody?

The main supported and recommended OS will continue to be Linux, in the form of Raspbian. We’ve put a lot of work in to optimising it to perform well on the hardware and it’s compatible with Pi 2 and all 4.5 million Pi 1 boards out there.

Also note that Windows will not be a desktop OS – just an IoT developer platform. It won’t be usable by itself without deploying applications from a PC.

The most important thing is that you will always have a choice. If you want Linux, you can choose Linux. There’s no need to move away because the hardware you’re using *can* run Windows. I’m sure you’re using a PC or laptop that *can* run Windows – but (I’m assuming) you chose to run Linux. It’s exactly the same with Pi.

First reaction was concern. Concern that the Pi-volution was haeding down the bigger-better-easier-predigested-sealedSolution path that we didn’t experience in the 80’s, and it was the overcoming of those problems that got the grey cells lining up.

However I can see the sense in such a release. It brings a new class of functionality for those in third world education to try out their own computation intensive tasks like fluid dynamics, render farms, RF Comms etc. especially if I.o.T. improves their lot in the process. And if that means Win10 is along for the ride, so be it. And it opens up the doors for serious industrial prototypers.

But I do hope the Model A+ will always remain in the scheme of things as each end of the spectrum defines the other. The A and the B lines are ( by nature of usage ) very different beasts, with the A line going down the absolute minimal side where it’s good and creative to be constrained by the limited spec, not to mention low power and weight which is it’s meal ticket. An A2+ [ or A+2 ] would be a bit of an enigma, sort of like an impoversihed B2+.

Anyway a good business decision.

—

Regards the ealier comment about B^2, I think the OP was referring to B squared, which is a reference to the Quad Core springing forth from a Single Core. Structural Engineers would see the math sense more than electrical engineers.

What worries me about Microsoft’s involvement is I remember how when linux was getting involved in the netbook market suddenly MS decided to jump in. They leveraged their market share to stamp out the advances that linux was beginning to make in that niche. There was also the way they stomped out linux in the “one laptop per child market.” I’m sure they feel threatened by linux on arm devices especially one meant for educational purposes. The very idea of children learning to compute without MS products is anathema to them. The EEE method rides again.

I’m not sure that keeping the upcoming upgrade secret was such a good move. Many of your buyers value transparency, it’s a core value of open source afterall, and previous indications led buyers to believe that no hardware revision was forthcoming in the short term. I don’t doubt many small organizations who just bought a bunch of B+ might have found it to be much more valuable to postpone. When you work with a very small budget and need to get funding, value is very important.

Would it not have been possible to sell the new Pi at 40$ and discount the old one at 30$ until inventories had shifted? Barring this, the landfill argument is on shaky ground : it may very well be that a sizeable portion of buyers who aren’t using the Pi for it’s GPIO are going to buy a new one, let the old one take dust and eventually dump it. Previous comments on the idea of establishing a centralized trade/gift program would go a long way to avoid this (I’d sure use it). E-waste needs to be taken seriously.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy about the new model, I just think it could have been handled differently. Engaging your community on such issues ahead of time and making them a part of the solution seems to be a better avenue for the future.

By the way, I’ve seen briefly mentionned that the work on Maynard had been put on hold, does this new model mean that it’s now completely off the agenda? Hope not!

They were selling netbooks with xp on after they anounced end of life! Lots of people I know got caught out by that. .. I Welcome MS to the Pi but am under no illusion that their motivations are completely different to the Linux comunity’s … We have to show by how we act that our way is better … after all the Pi should be educational for everyone .. including MS

I think people are getting a little wound up about the “micro$oft” thing. The problem Microsoft will face is the entire Raspberry Pi ecosystem isn’t tolerant of their methodologies so even if they port the entire Windows 10 experience (or even the phone/tablet version) to the Pi 2 they’ll have a difficult time. I can see people signing up for their Developer programme, but mainly out of curiosity!

In addition, Win10 for ARM wouldn’t the same as Win10 for desktops and the innocent will expect to be able to run their existing windows software on a Pi2 ….

Yep, this happened to me. The old layer 3 of the B+ case won’t fit on the new Pi 2. The cpu is actually not a problem, but a couple of condensators definitely and I think the USB-LAN chip are in the way.

It is a bit funny to see people preaching the “Open Source” culture as a model of freedom and on the other hand raising the shields when the new Raspberry Pi is announced to be supported by new operating systems.

It is all a matter of freedom, needs and choice.

The Raspberry Pi is designed to be a learning tool. It is not designed to be YOUR computer.

With this partnership, the Raspberry Fundation brings the opportunity for people who want to learn Microsoft technologies or to build project based on Windows 10 IoT to do so. You should be happy.

There is no good and no bad on this topic. There are just choices to take based base on what you want and what you need.

There is no point ranting about proprietary software or hardware for the same reason.

The most funny thing is that you guys are preaching freedom and openess but you are showing here that you are maybe the less open-minded of us.

While i am still getting a Pi2… i am gonna stick with Linux… and what not.. cause microsoft has too much damn red tape involved to use windows 10.. you can’t just be a tinkerer…. so forget that.. i will just stick with Linux based OSs..
Still, looking forward big time to getting one!
I can’t wait.. been considering one for a LONG time, but kept putting it off until i did a search oddly enough ON the 2nd and seen the info up about it!
Planning to try and build a simple box for playing simple games on my TV.
I see the Pi2 as something perfect for a small console for playing more simplistic games.

OK! So there is no official distribution channel in Poland for personal usage. If you have a company you can buy it at RS, if you don’t own a company …. buy from people who raise price for their own profit.

Very funny ….. Raspberry Pi 2 black market. Is that what foundation want?

I don’t understand how adding the option of another operating System can be a bad thing. There are versions of RiscOS, FreeRtos, various Unix derivatives and now a Microsoft operating system. One more alternative to see different strategies for implementing driver architectures and one which will offer different services to experiment with and learn from.

As a bit of a counterpoint to “Android on Pi”, I’ve got several Android phones, including a couple of non-activated prepaid phones that cost me $10 or $20 in the run up to Christmas. In the US at least, one can routinely buy low end Android devices in the $40 range with CPU and memory specs similar to a B+ and with integrated accelerometer, GPS, touch display, battery backup, audio I/O, and WiFi thrown in for good measure. The only advantage the PI offers is discrete I/O. Why would anyone use a Raspberry Pi to learn Android development given this reality?

While I’m on the topic, for educational purposes, the MIT App Inventor stuff is worth checking out. Much like the work of the RPF, it makes entry level programming very accessible, though in the Android device domain.

Everyone feels that the RPF are in league with M$ not so
…
The crucial word is development and if the people who splash “install Windows 10 on RPi” on Blogs would get their facts straight stupid comments would not be posted.
From the original blog post:
Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run … Microsoft Windows 10.
…
For the last six months we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2.

You will have to admit that the original blog post does not sound like “Microsoft has decided to port a version of Windows 10 for headless applications to Raspberry Pi 2.” It does sound like “The foundation has been working to let you use Windows 10 on your Raspberry Pi.” Don’t blame the misunderstanding on readers who IMHO may be forgiven to not grasp the range of IoT applications targeted by this development, as there is actually very little specific information provided.

Florian Manach says: (to all the anti-Microsoft comments)
“The most funny thing is that you guys are preaching freedom and openess but you are showing here that you are maybe the less open-minded of us.”

Additionally, even people buying the Pi2 to ‘only’ run Windows 10 IoT on it (rather than Linux), still generate sales revenue for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to plough back into their (Linux based) education mission. It’s a bit like when people where complaining about people buying the Pi to ‘only’ use it as a media player…

Let us leave the ridiculous conspiracy theories on the doorstep, shall we? Especially when there are also proprietary parts of the Pi. Besides, life’s too short to sit online and over-analyse things and draw unbalanced, unfounded, cherry-picked “conclusions”. Business uses what works – Windows works – noone except extremists and FOSS fanboys care too much about wasting their lives pulling apart source code, EVEN IF they knew how to read it (IE, we don’t all speak in C++ source).

Live your life, use what works. The vast majority of this “open” stuff you use, you’d never have the time to sit and analyse ALL the source code for AND have time for life itself, in a million years.

I think it’s great news that Windows is coming and don’t believe this will be Armageddon for Linux on these devices. Instead, this looks like the 80’s PCs where increased demand skyrocketed and brought prices down dramatically. Anybody remember how much a 8088 cost? Plus, it provided the best hardware platform that allowed Linux to flourish even with MS-DOS dominating them.

Instead, I see Linux and Windows playing up both of their strengths. Linux has 100% tweakability, loads of mind-share and can change & improve daily. Windows has consistency, compatibility, and if they support it, xaml+RT api are actually pretty good.

So, we get more choices. Raspberry Pi gets a lot more customers to drive volume and scale which should lower prices and enable more innovation. Why complain?

Glad to see a new Pi2 come out. But… It should have happened long time ago along with a 1Ghz cpu, 1Gb Ram and gigabit nic. There is another board out there with 1.5Ghz ARM cpu, 1gb ram and gigabit nic for $35. Tell me why should I buy the Pi2? I’ll probably end up buying both and test them out and runs some benchmarks. Thumbs up for bringing Windows 10 to the Pi2. You are expanding the end-user base enormously with that.

Raspberry Pi has awesome community support you don’t see with Average Joe Random Board From China.

Yes, the spec on some other boards is competitive (usually the price isn’t) but there’s no use having a slightly faster board you paid extra for if there’s no-one to help you get it working.

Every day thousands of people use Raspberry Pi in education, industry and hobby projects – the wealth of experience of these users is fed into making the Pi better – even the ones who are learning along the way, or have no idea what they’re doing – their questions and bug reports help identify problems which can be resolved by the community or our own engineers.

Would have have been happier for Raspberry Pi 2 to have a different form factor, different chip, be incompatible with previous models, be more expensive and have single core and the same RAM, but have better ethernet and USB? There are other boards that tick all those boxes.

We care more about stability for our education users than the introduction of faster ports.

I just picked one up at micro center! I did not expect to see it there. I had one on order with element 14. be aware that this is a non-cancel item! I could not believe that .. I still do not have a ship date for the item and yet I can’t cancel the order. The sales rep said she would try and get it cancelled .. I realize you don’t want to get in any sort of conflict with your distributor but this was my experience .. hopefully they will cancel it..
-don
cleveland, ohio

I remember days when Raspberrypi was intended for children around the world who did not have a pc, but thay have a old tv so they could connect a raspberry pi via s-video connector to a tv, today with a new raspberrypi thay cannot do that, what a shame :)

I am so happy to hear this!! What amazing news.
After playing with my pi for a few months even getting sonic pi working, I found I needed a new tv recorder. So it is happily running tvheadend and connected to a 1tb drive is working great. Crashes about once a week for unknown reasons but really i cannot complain – it even managed to record a program whilst i was using the Pi to playback a movie – epic.

But I worry I am asking too much of it – so a quad core 900mhz machine is just awesome. I reckon I could then have several connections watching video as well as recording tv.

Maybe you’re missing that it’s cheaper than nearly everything else for ARMv7, it’s quad core, and that it takes up no space at all (or, really, electrical power.) It’s a lovely dev board for enthusiasts rather that for cynics.

Wonderful addition to the Raspberry Pi family, I’m looking forward to adding the new Pi2 to my Pi family. I’m sure the Raspberry Pi staff here “I love your system, but I just wish it had …” My “wish it had” is some type of built-in eMMC storage and/or a socket to accept some type of eMMC storage module. I certainly concede that adding this may cause the build cost to push the retail price over $35 and/or push the power targets over their respective max targets, so I will continue to wish. In the meantime, the Pi2 will be a wonderful addition.

Thank you Liz Upton. I called Microcenter and they just sold out this morning. The other two sites have several thousand on order with no stock. Guess I have to wait. MC is probably the best bet at this point to buy in the USA.

Having microsoft on board is a massive game changer. The raspberry pi will be the first arm based computer with broad appeal that runs windows. The only other was the microsoft surface running windows RT, but that was a disaster. This will generate a real demand for arm compatible mainstream software such as office and developer studio – which is why i reckon microsoft are interested in the pi.

In case someone follows this, I was still in time to order Raspberry Pi 2’s and sending back the B+’s seems to have worked as well, so I bet we’ll have some happy faces and a -not literally- smoking fast Mathematica workshop next week…
Really lucked out on this one!

Presumably you are completely unaware of the connection between Broadcom and the Foundation – without Brcm, the Pi would never have existed. It’s an interesting story, documented in many placed.

It’s fairly certain that without the levels of tech support from Broadcom and their staff, the Pi would not be as good a device as it is today.

It also happens that the lack of low level GPU documentation (which is actually commonplace in the arena) has not really impacted the Pi sales, or its efforts in the education sector, at all. And moving to a different chip would break every single Raspberry Pi specific project out there, which is clearly not something that the Foundation is willing to do.

Finally, 4.5M units sold, pretty good, but not enough to make Broadcom open up completely – they are used to sales of much higher volumes than that.

Awesome! Should easily break 1 GHz. Huge improvement. Biggest problem I had with the Model B was the anemic processor. Worked OK for coding, but just not enough umpf to run an OS and processes comfortably. This is a massive step forword.

Bought A, B, then 4xB+ last August. I ordered 2xPi 2 as soon as I read about it from element 14. The package arrived on Thurs. I started playing with Pi 2 yesterday. Got a 1gb micro sd to boot the Pi 2 using a 2 TB desktop usb hard disk GPT formatted. Everything working beautifully and very fast. Very impressed. The 1gb ram will make a huge difference on some of the memory hog applications. Great job! Excellent effort, results speak for itself.

I would LOVE to find a website that actually sells the Pi 2 for $35 and ships it affordably to Belgium.AdaFruit charges $45 (+/- €40) and I have no clue on shipping prices as they’re out of stock. Pi Supply charges £30 + £10 chipping (+/- €53).

Three seconds on Google found me a USB microphone for £3, and a wifi dongle will set you back about the same. Your “real world applications” thing – well, it’s a bit silly. I direct you to Google again – or if you’re really lazy, just have a look around the website you’re currently on.

No; head over to the forums and do a search to learn more. The folks at Arch weren’t happy giving us an iso (which we needed to offer a download here and to be consistent with other distros), but would only allow us to use a tarball, which isn’t really helpful for the majority of users, so you’ll have to visit their site for it instead.

Congrats to the fondation, you have done a fantastic job !
I ordered a pi from from the second batch. I guess i should call it a chinese model A raspberry pi.
I ordered it the 3 april and received it the 29th june.
I had to wait and come here to watch every news.
You made the wait enjoyable, sharing the CE redpaper, the upside down ethernet mistake and the so many hiccup along the way to my door.
Liz you did a fantastic job being so transparent about every problem you met to deliver the pi while at the same time being so cheerfull. I never felt angry during the whole process, just excited. When i received my pi i received the coolest micro-computer ever but also a great raspberry pi / element 14 t-shirt that i proudly wear.

This time i ordered the pi a few minutes after the annoucement and received it 2 days later !
You have come a long way.
Congrats to you and everybody involved in the project. It’s fantastic.
THe pi 2 is so great !

Since the Nic is a USB internal device, simply add another USB Nic adapter to it. I’m doing that for $12 from a vendor on ebay.
Try running the IPFire arm image and you will have a really nice firewall once you figure out how to store the logs without burning up the SD card. Also recommend using the heat sink kits with it since it tends to keep the processor busy looking after you.

Even more ! The extra CPU power and RAM make him a very potent media station. The old one i will keep trying, to install openmedia vault on it in order to transform it into a NAS. One think that i love about the pi is how it helps me to recycle old stuff. I had everything already at home for the new pi. I’m just looking for a new case now.
I might have found a somehow easy DYIish case for my raspberry pi 2

Nice performance upgrade, but you should think on IO – and GPU performance too. I’m waiting on Raspberry Pi 3 with support for eMMC-Moduls (like ODROID) and HEVC/H.265 codec! And a 3.5mm audio jack with 4 pins (or seperate 3 pin audio jack) for mic support would also be nice! And of course power and reset buttons! And 1Gbit ethernet… and… and… and… Wow, much potential. :-)

The SD corruption is not just on overclocked units or certain types of card. I have bought dozens of Pi’s and tried numerous branded/unbranded and different classes of card. Some fail sooner, some later but they all corrupt the card in the end. If it’s not fixed on the new model that is bad. Never had any problems with the performance of the B. It happily plays HD video with the CODEC keys in and that is about as intense as it gets. The 2 major problems were and apparently still are no WOL and SD corruption.

35USD??? I wonder where is the place to get one in such price…. I am to naive… when I see 35 I am expecting to pay 35$, so far this is not to be true… it is a bad PR to advertise the price when in reality this is not achieved…. I wonder how people will react when someone will shout: Rolex! Rolex on sale now! at 35$…. once you click buy now button, you get to paid 55$ instead of 35$ (and this will be the price of the item itself without shipping costs).

As has been explained many times in the 3 years that the Pi has been on sale at $35, that $35 excludes tax and shipping because the Pi is sold worldwide, so it’s impossible to indicate the prices for every single country as they all have different tax rates.

I can’t wait for the new Raspberry Pi with gigabit lan and usb3 comming late august this year.
Why do I know this, you ask? Because they deny having these plans. That is the one thing I learned from the discussion about 6 month ago, when they released the b+.
And one thing is for certain: If I they lie to you once and get away with it (or are even praised for it by their fanboys), they’ll do it again for certain.
One other reason they can do so is probably because they dominate the market of these small computers with impressive numbers sold. And many people seems to like it, but f… M$, of course.

When is expected Kali Linux version for the new Raspberry Pi 2? The previous Raspberry Pi Kali Linux version does not work on Raspberry Pi 2.
Are there any possibilities to use Microsoft Skype or Google Hangouts on Raspberry Pi 2? They both are available for Linux via Internet browser plugins.

After installing a brand new NOOBS card purchased directly from the foundation, installing Raspbian and booting on the B+, I then ran
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo rpi-update.
Moved the card into the RPi 2 and it sticks on the color splash screen. Power is good. It seems that info about RPi 2 boot problems is scattered around the forums and comments. Can someone direct me to a definitive source of info on getting the RPi 2 booted? I want to see this thing rock and roll!

Hi all,
MagPi issue 30 is out now, there’s an article about RPi 2 in it, from Ian McAlpine.

I’ve quote a part about Windows 10 on RPi2

“There has been some speculation about just how
capable Windows 10 will be on the Raspberry Pi 2.
There are several Windows 10 IoT derivatives
including “Mobile” for phones, low-end tablets, etc.
and “Athens” for resource constrained devices. I have
a US$99 tablet with an Intel Atom quad core CPU
and 1 GB RAM. I t runs the FULL version of Windows
8.1 very well.
Steve Teixeira from Microsoft has commented that
they are running “real” Windows 10 on the Raspberry
Pi 2, but as it is optimised for the Raspberry Pi 2 it
does not include the full Windows experience. Time
will reveal what that actually means but,given the positive experience I have with my cheap tablet, I have no doubt that Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 2 will
be equally as good. I t will certainly be interesting to
explore Visual Studio and program the GPIO using
Windows development tools.”

Any comments from the foundation? Liz? Ebed? Does it mean we could build our own Windows 10 tablet based on RPi2?

This is GREAT news!
I’m new to the raspberry Pi concept and just bought a magazine here in the Netherlands for introducing the RPI to a beginner. So..I wanted to buy a Pi. And now there is a complete NEW version!
Only one question: Can I hook up all the addons (like a 7″ touch screen) designed for the RPI 1 to the RPI 2?
Keep up the good stuff!

I’ve been trying to get Raspberry Pi B+ for a while and finally found a supplier where I live (Lebanon) who distributes RS products, they are asking over 75$ + tax for the B+ and 45$ + tax for the Pi Noir Camera and now they don’t know if and when they will have B+ or Pi2 (actually they didn’t know about Pi2 at all).

do you guys know an online supplier/Distributor that ships to Lebanon? or where can I get Pi products?

I waited months for a new raspberry model specifically to have better performance and finally bought Model B+ In August when it was available. I trusted you and believed that the next model would not be available in at least a couple of years.

But now a even better model is released only 6 months after the B+ is released. I would have waited for Model 2 if it was made clear that the model 2 would be arriving within months.

Now I’m sitting on a B+ and Model 2 offers Windows 10, which is a killer feature for me. And I will be forced to switch.

Why did you guys do this to us? You guys saw it coming but fooled us into buying a stepover model which you will probably stop supporting in days.

Hmm. You paid $35 (not exactly a huge amount of money), and got EXACTLY what you paid for. How is that being ripped off? Model change all the time. If you were always waiting for the next model you would never buy anything.

Note Win10 is NOT the desktop version, so probably not what you think it is.

That’s not really how it works. Some companies (resellers) buy in bulk, but an awful lot of Pi2 have been sold to end users as well. 20k are being made per day, so you should be able to buy from the main sellers (RS, Farnell) at the standard price pretty quickly. I’d suggest staying way from people trying to increase the price, and wait for a week or two until you can get one at the proper price.

I may report that Kali Linux is fully functional on Raspberry Pi 2!
I used the previous Kali Linux image kali-1.0.9-rpi.img.xz (from https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-vmware-arm-image-download/).
It is only necessary from Raspbian (using an USB SD card reader) to replace the Kali Linux /boot folder with the Raspian /boot folder and to copy the latest Raspian /lib/modules:
sudo cp -r /lib/modules/3.18.6.v7+ media/xxxx/lib/modules
That is all!

I received a Pi 2 in the mail today, and it says “Made in PRC”. What is going on here? I only purchased because of reassurance by Ben Nuttall. This was shipped to the US, so I should have received a UK model.

Once the initial demand dies down there will be no need for Chinese made boards (they are only available because the Sony factory in UK cannot make them fast enough – they are currently making 20k per day).

Hello, does anyone know if this will help the hdmi input conundrum? I need to get an hdmi input to stream as real time wirelessly from a gopro to a iPad/monitor/laptop? Anyone know how to acccomplish this or if the new pi will help?

Hi, just received my RPi 2 to replace my RPi B. I ordered it from Element14 and to my surprise, it no longer says ‘made in the UK’ but it says ‘made in PRC’ is that correct, or did I get some Chinese knock off??

Another thing, I’ve been using an USB hub that also powered the RPi B via the backfeed, but it seems like that doesn’t work anymore, is that normal, or am I just doing something wrong?

Back-powering was removed last year when we made the B+ – it was only there because the power management wasn’t great on the B, and it didn’t *really* give you enough power for most tasks. It went in the B+ a consequence of improving the power control.

Because of the high demand, some Pi2’s destined for places outside Europe were made in PRC. Once demand dies down, its likely that al production wil be done at the Sony factory in Wales, UK. They are currently making 20k a day, which isn’t enough..

Its an ossm stuff. . .I have used the B+ model and now want to work out something new in this new model. . can you please tell me where can I find it in india please post the link of the site if possible. Thanks in advance :)

I am a B+ owner, and a big fan. It makes me ill to see so many thugs in the USA buying up supply and selling them for twice the price. Please do not support these low brow scumbags. Supply will catch up sooner or later.

I recently purchased a Raspberry 2, but it did not work on my monitor, or TV and would not even see the mini 64 GB SD card. So, I was forced to return both. Is there a known fault on this model ? As I should have been able to just replace my existing Pi B, with the Pi 2.

I’m interested by the Raspberry Pi 2, to use it as a private web server (debian distro).
I found the maximum SD card size would be 32GB for SDHC.
For more (64 or 128GB) you need to get a SDXC card.
Is the SD card reader compatible ?
If not, is it possible install the OS onto an external hard drive plugged in the USB port ? If so, would you get a loss in performance due to the access time (USB 2 I believe)?

Wait, what? Who wants to deal with the hassle of Linux? I use Linux because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of Windows! If you can’t be bothered to learn Linux, own it. Don’t bash the OS just because you can’t (or won’t) handle it.

(Just for the record, I have a great deal of experience with both, and I only use Windows for games, because it is much more complicated to do many things in Windows than in Linux.)

Raspberry pi B2 ++ ? hope so! however 10/100 USB problems are only a problem for me when under heavy load .. I have a website running of a piB … surprisingly nippy … Transferring large files is a ‘slow and steady’ process.

I just approved this comment about thirty seconds after approving your forum comment on the same topic! Yes, what you’re referring to is a USB hub, and it’ll work without you having to do anything at all: just plug it in, your keyboard and mouse (or other devices) into it, and everything will work.

Same as this guy…I’m no scrub, I do this for a living, and yes I have a good power suppoyad a sanctioned SD card. I know these are factory tested, so I’m basically stuck. I’vet tried three different SD cards and *4* different power supplies…All of which work in my B+. Something ain’t right!

I explicitly asked prior to my purchasing the RPi2 whether these are made in China, and received the following response in this forum:

Ben Nuttall says:
4th Feb 2015 at 1:40 am
The Raspberry Pi is designed in Cambridge, UK by Raspberry Pi engineers and manufactured by Sony in Pencoed in Wales, UK. They say “Made in the UK” on the board.
However a small proportion are manufactured on behalf of Premier Farnell in China – but these are for the Eastern markets.

I received the Raspberry Pi 2 and it says “made in PRC”. I feel that I was lied to. I am either going to sell this or try to get my money back. I will never buy another Raspberry Pi product.

In what country are you? Some USA and N.American Pi’s were made in China to reduce the backlog. This will stop as soon as demand can be catered for by Sony in Wales.

Note that the China Pi is exactly the same as the UK Pi, and is made to the same standard, and also that the Foundation makes the same amount of money per Pi wherever it is made, since they licence the design, rather than make them themselves.

This is great!
I just read your article this morning and decided I needed to get one *immediately*. Luckily I was able to get one from the local computer shop for the right price. Great product. Some serious fun computing in a case that would not even fit a moderate cpu fan. If six months from now you design a faster one I will get that one as well. Immediately.

See some discussion here about delivery in various countries and about price. The situation now, after 1 month, is that you can’t get one for less than £30 in uk and rs and farnell out of stock are quoting delivery end March. Even amazon is out of stock unless you pay £32.

So my point is that the $35 delivery now headline in blog from 2nd Feb is WRONG and violates trades descriptions etc should IMO be removed. Has anyone ever bought rpi 2 for $35? Suspect not!

An important thing many non-US residents fail to grasp is the deep resentment in the US for China and its policies and ethics. China doesn’t respect (foreign) intellectual property and doesn’t fight piracy of Western products, many of US origin. This in turn has led to (confirmed) job losses in the US and is thought to have significantly influenced (deepened) economic recessions in the past. A fair number of Americans have rallied on the issue and made a concious decision never to buy from China, whether it’s Chinese produce or Western products made in China (which would involve a whole range of Apple products, btw!). I’d guess Matt H. belongs to this group. Mind, IMO this group does have a valid point, but personally favour a more pragmatic approach. In essence, the Chinese Communists are abusing the American capitalist system for their political and economical benefit, as they block the vast Chinese market for full and unimpeded access from Western companies, again most of US origin.

The above borders very much on politics, but IMO it is imperative to emphasise that some visitors have genuine concerns to where their RPi (of any model) actually comes from.

Update:
Finally we may download the official Kali LInux image kali-1.1.0-rpi2.img.xz from https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-vmware-arm-image-download/. It works right after extracting and placing on microSD card.
Still the Kali Linux is not optimized and the benchmark rezults using Nbench – BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark are around 60% of the Raspbian and Fedora 21 benchmarks. Nevertheless Kali LInux performance on RPI2 is OK and it is offering an impressive pentesting collection.

I’m getting really tired of seeing these claims that the Pi 2 is available at $35. For one thing IT ISN’T available for the exchange rate equivalent of $35 in the UK. The claims that your official distributors sell it for that are an outright blatant lie. RS opened it at that price on the first for just 6 hours on the first day of trading it, then bumped the price up by nearly £4 on each unit. Element14 Farnell charge even more… and buy the time you add the shipping and VAT NOBODY in the UK can get hold of an R-Pi2 for less than about £30 to £32 at best!!

SO, your official distributors don’t even sell them at that price. Your constant banging on about the price being $35 is not only wrong it is intentionally misleading.

Why is it that a product designed in the UK manufactured in the UK and shipped in the UK is more expensive than for somebody in the USA!!! This makes no sense except that somebody is creaming money off the top! You need to take your official distributors in hand and demand that they sell at the correct RP.

Or do we have to continue to suffer the fact that we live in rip off Britain.

This has been discussed to death over the last three years. It’s $35 (converted to local currency) plus tax (whatever that may be where you are) plus postage and packing. That adds up to different amounts around the world. Note that the USA pays the same. So it is not more expensive in the UK than for example the States.

Hi! So I would like to but one of these raspberry pies as I would like to build my own robot!!
So please could you tell me where do I buy these from! I’m from the UK so it would be great if it was in pounds not dollars thankyou please reply quickly as I a, very eager to start making a robot and could you set up a raspberry jam day near me something like in Middlesbrough or something thankyou for reading this ☺️ :)

BUT
the “all connectors are at the same place” i not right, and where can i find some really interesting things like tecnical data ? what kind of sd-card do i need now ? ok, ok, i can find all at google but for professional electronic it’s not ok.

Anyone know if the peripheral’s (such as GPIO) will remain the same. Specifically, I would like to know if the SPI Interface of the GPIO on the Raspberry Pi will remain the same, or will it be able to work at a faster sampling-rate?

Wonderful little board!
Now, on the next revision, a number of us (ham radio enthusiasts doing high speed DSP) need some LVDS channels run
out to a connector or header.
This will allow us to connect something like the LT2208 ADC.

@FrankM It won’t run x86 Windows (this is something that needs to be clarified up front!) because it has an ARM processor, so what you’re saying is entirely invalid as all the x86 Windows viruses will not run on it.

To create a notebook as thin and light as the new MacBook, we had to strive for efficiency in every detail, right down to how it connects to peripherals and power. So we contributed to a new universal connectivity standard that combines the essential functions you need every day in one dynamic port. The amazing USB-C port offers charging, quick USB 3 data transfer for connecting to external devices and peripherals, and video output that supports HDMI, VGA, and DisplayPort connections. All in a small, reversible design that’s one-third the size of the current USB port.
Shop USB-C accessories
USB-C
POWER
USB
DISPLAY
HDMI
VGA

that’s what apple has to say about usb type-c on the new macbook page.

the NY times says google, apple, and monoprice all back usb c. it is supposed to be the standard for the next 10-15-20 years. it should go on whatever gen pi cones out when it’s the standard. otherwise it’s kinda dorky.

Microsoft was handing out a respectable pile of these for free at their annual education/pep rally conference, Ignite, in early May. Someone sent that fact out on Yammer, and they were all gone well before I got there.

Microsoft getting behind Raspberry Pi 2 opens a lot of potential to see Azure public cloud integrated IoT devices, which is especially interesting given the way you can offload processing to the cloud and leverage cloud resident services such as Service Bus app-to-app messaging and device alerting.

*(For those of you familiar with Microsoft but not the name, this was the 20k-attendees-per-year TechEd conference for-nearly-ever, but they rolled some of the smaller conferences into it and renamed it “Ignite” this year.)

Almost 5 months in and we still can’t get this system for its advertised retail price. Had one on order but my vendor never had any and couldn’t give a lead time. They didn’t even know! Cancelled after waiting a month.

At this point I’m thinking of giving up and getting a compute stick. It’s ridiculous at this point.